Alright second half of my write up of our Urban Shadow Experience.  This will cover Debts and first play session.

Alright second half of my write up of our Urban Shadow Experience.  This will cover Debts and first play session.

Debts are brilliant!

When we got to this stage the table clearly had its doubts when I told them that we would be going around the table one by one and the other player had to accept the debt you chose for them.   We got started and after the first two people most of the table saw the beauty in the system.  The sharing of Debts slowly, allowing time for people to think, and the power to choose who the Debt affected and why (with their input) allowed for some amazing connections.  The Vamp supplying the Hunter with his drug fix.  The Hallowed having provided the information to the police that scared the human traffickers causing them to drown their cargo creating the Spectre.

After having read some of the comments here about the Debts system I told them all that they needed to have at least one PC Debt and one NPC Debt.  This allowed for more creation of a cast of characters as well as tying the group together one step removed since they used some of each others NPC relations.  Overall we were really impressed with how this worked out.  Even in a large nine player group the process was smooth and very fruitful.

This week we sat down to actually play.

One session was not enough.

We started with out beginning moves.  The Vamp used his Web ability to learn a secret about the Hunter (It was that he used to voluntarily feed vampires his blood).  The Oracle used her ability to see the future and got  a 10+ so she was holding two moments of possible vision.  The Immortal used his Session Move to learn that a Fae named Lord Goldenrod of the Summer Court was in the city seeking an amulet stolen from him 3 years earlier by a man named Yanosh.  Who happens to be The Veteran’s assistant.

Then we started the opening move for everyone.  It was great to see who did not trust whom right from the beginning with our Debts already in place.  The information created in this phase was brilliant.  We learned a lot about the supernatural society and a lot of NPCs were named and this info led to almost every member of the group getting embroiled in something from the rumours, gifts and opportunities. The problem was nine players.  With nine players it was really a long process and would have been hard to replicate time wise every session.  We all liked the results but could see the problem with it for such a large group.  This was the only part that felt like we couldn’t pull it off with so many players.  It was nice to be able to mark a Faction though because it allowed you to help the other player if you wanted as well as allowing someone to avoid a lot of Faction contact and still Advance.  I think we will tweak it somehow such as every three sessions do the rumours and such.  Not sure on that one.

Once we started playing everyone knew what they wanted to do. There were so many possible stories, alliances, and setting details already in the collective minds that the characters all hit the ground running.  They werent all running in the same direction but they were all racing somewhere.  It was great.

We all wanted more and will definitely revisit US again.  It is a long campaign game if I have ever seen one. Looking forward to writing up more detail and exploring this system further.

I do not have all of my observations from the players handy so I will need to add those in later.  Great work overall guys. Well done.