Well, we are getting closer to a finished product for 4 of my WoD Add-on books for Urban Shadows (Apocalypse World hack) and I wanted to give them out to the public to for that last round of feedback. Here is what we are working on:
• Vampire the Masquerade (proofed, play tested, PDFed, just needs a final round of proofing)
o Download: https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B9Hhx1yXlz-OWWhqM1FkN1VWbVE/edit?usp=sharing
• Werewolf the Forsaken (proofed, play tested, PDFed, just needs a final round of proofing)
o Download: https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B9Hhx1yXlz-OdEJuTVNBcXZ5SWM/edit?usp=sharing
• Mage the Awakening (proofed, play tested, PDFed, just needs a final round of proofing)
o Download: https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B9Hhx1yXlz-Oc19fNzUxVl9OZXc/edit?usp=sharing
• Hunter the Vigil (proofed, play tested, PDFed, just needs a final round of proofing)
o Download: https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B9Hhx1yXlz-ONUp5RHNhR3N4ZFk/edit?usp=sharing
• Orpheus (based on Spectre) (proofed, play tested)
• Slasher (First round of proofing almost down)
• Demon the Fallen (Being worked on)
• Changeling the Lost (Being worked on)
Enjoy the PDF’s and I would love to hear your feedback, which you can leave in this thread or comment on the working document here, that we keep all of the documents on.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1vAfokBManOfs96xyvhPB2q6P1lR3PrN1OGNmjkLoqk8/edit
To play this game, you will need Urban Shadows by Andrew Medeiros here:
Big thanks to Anton Dominic, Steve Moore, and John Layton for writing so much, plus Aaron Friesen and Tim Franzke for helping give great feedback.
Sub for later. I’m quite interested in this, since I had a very similar project, in the past.
Friend of mine played this at the Con. She gave it rave reviews. I’ll have to check it out.
Note: Urban Shadows has moved to letter sized formatting, but I have decided to keep these add-ons at legal size formatting ….. for now.
Wanted to answer this question as well, as we get it a lot …. why the mix of nWoD and oWod? Why Mage the Awakening and not Mage the Ascension, ect?
We struggled a lot with deciding to use nWoD or oWoD, and even within my team we have debates about which is better. We ended up mixing them. In the end our decision was about two thing.
1.) Which one was more plausible as an add-on to Urban Shadows as ideally, we wanted to change the base game as little as possible.
2.) If a MC wants to play a multi-book campaign, which books once stripped down of a lot of the fiction fit together better.
Our objective is that with just Urban Shadows and these books, that a player, never playing WoD can jump right in. We may not be perfect …. yet, but I know we are close.
Another thing about the reason I ultimately decided on Awakening over Ascension: Awakening looked cleaner and was more familiar to me. Ascension was a bunch of different groups and I didn’t have the actual experience with the system itself. It seemed a lot easier to me to use the five Paths and Orders and give them spells to add onto the Wizard’s list rather than trying to pick apart an unfamiliar system that many people have claimed to be complex and complicated.
And For Hunter, the decision was pretty easy for me: Vigil hunters are more human than Reckoning hunters. It nails home the Mortality aspect, with the exception of a few groups.
I haven’t checked out Urban Shadows yet, but I used to be a big fan of Mage: The Ascension and I dunno – a lot of the ways in which MtA was challenging as a crunchy mechanic-heavy system would essentially go away in the rules light, fiction first context of the Apocalypse Engine. The idea is basically that you can bend reality to your will, but consensus reality (as guided by the Technocracy) will push back and push back harder the more blatantly you violate their rules. They set up Spheres you needed to master that determined what sort of reality alterations you could perform (that could be used in concert), and a lot of stuff about rotes and gradations of spheres and etc etc and yeah, there were nine factions (not counting the bad guys) who each focused on a sphere and had different signature styles, but the core is just bending reality to your will and that seems like it could be handled by having just a handful of moves. Possibly as simple as “when you bend reality to your will, roll +magic”, or maybe split it based on whether you’re doing it in line with consensual reality (“coincidental”) or just blatantly casting spells, or if you must, have moves that gradate the level of effect you can produce. That honestly seems a lot easier than setting up spell lists and such. But it might not fit Urban Shadows’ particular context, granted.
Barac, if we were doing just Mage … Maybe. I do not like the way Mage the Ascension plays with others, so it was one reason I agreed with John to scrap it for Mage the Awakening which fits perfectly.
I would have scrapped VtM for VtR if we had found issues with it as well.
Well, granted, a lot of the oWoD stuff fits awkwardly with one another – it felt like a bunch of cool ideas shoehorned into the same metaplot. The nWoD I think was explicitly designed to all work together. That doesn’t stop Awakening from being way less interesting in its own right, though. As with a number of the other nWoD takes on things.
Edit: Though I don’t want to give the impression that I’m entirely against nWoD. Their takes on Changeling and Hunter in particular are substantially more coherent and interesting.
Barac. That is why I am picking and choosing from both.
I am also stripping if you read the docs 90% of the meta plots so MCs can make a game with history that is their own.
I get that. I just think you made the wrong call in this particular instance. But it’s your call to make. 🙂
Barac, the problem is you haven’t checked out Urban Shadows. Ascension does not work with the Wizard from US, Awakening does.
Excuse my short typing, on a phone.
Barac, every addon we made had two requirements as listed above. We felt Ascension failed at both elements so didn’t even get to step 3…. If it is or is not our preferred.
if you think you can help get Asension added on still meeting our requirements ( works with us and can work with cross play) I will gladly give feedback, add it in and lay it out.
Oops. I managed to skip right past those criteria and focus on John’s comments about its mechanics/messy fluff. I’m not nearly comfortable enough with Apocalypse World or its derivatives yet to feel confident trying to write playbooks or hacks for any of them, and I’m sure you’re probably right that Ascension doesn’t meet your primary criteria. I just feel strongly that it’s a substantially more interesting setting and concept of magery than Awakening’s and that it would, in and of itself, do better with a fiction-first, rules light system like the Apocalypse Engine than something as relatively crunchy as Storyteller, and would probably be easier to convert than Awakening. Whether such a conversion would fit Urban Shadows’ framework or work well with other supernatural species is another thing entirely.
Barac, read urban shadows and if you ever think we can fit it under one of their playbooks …… I would almost prefer that. Then, hit me up. And I wouldn’t worry about having little knowledge. Its why there are others, its why we help each other.
Barac Wiley, add me to one of your circles and I can send you a couple of docs.
That’s okay. I was commenting in passing. I’m not really interested in working on hacks anytime soon.