I’m coming in on playing Urban Shadows with a group of completely new roleplayers and I realized that I hadn’t planned anything. The reason for this is that with my regular group of gamers, they provided such richness to the world and happenings through the rumors that I felt like putting in my own plot-threads would have been doing them a disservice.
Has anyone run with completely new players yet? How much prep do you do for Urban Shadows games either with newbies or in general?
I’ve run it with 2 complete newbies and a relative new player and it went extremely well. Some of the new players feel a bit intimidated about coming up with new content for rumours, but honestly so do a lot of veterans.
I would def encourage them to offer up ideas but if they seem stuck you can ask loaded questions to get them rolling.
For example. “You got Power spotlighted, that’s awesome! What rumour have you heard about the council of wizards on the east side? Do you think maybe the rumours of them using live sacrifices might be true?”
That kinda stuff.
A guy comes in and says “thanks for killing my brother for me but everyone is on your tail now” and see what happens
I think the character creation stuff will present absolutely loads of material for it. In fact, I’d say you are far more likely to run into the problem of “creating too much interesting stuff to keep track of” then a dearth of it.
I would say the prep you can do is to think about what you want your city to be about, and how the factions reflect this. If this is a burned out city where everybody’s just holding on to what they can, then make turf real important and ask questions about it.
If this is a game about gentrification and displacement and immigration and all of that, then the Fae and Wolf are really key playbooks to think about.
All good stuff! (I especially like Jason Corley’s trololololol suggestion. Mysteries work great in US and James Stuart really nails it when he says “think about your city…”
I’d also note that you want people to commit to more than 1 session, if possible. The 1st session of any Urban Shadows game is broad; you need to get to know the characters a bit. The second sessions is usually when things really pick up, so I’d set that expectation early. 😀
Oh! I really like the leading questions! That is a good thing to have in my back pocket!
I appreciate the thought of think about your city! There’s certainly a whole bunch going on in the RL version of the city we chose that I can zoom in on in terms of general thinking. Perhaps even thinking about some direct NPCs and stuff.
That would be a hilarious way to do it, Jason! I’m slightly concerned that’ll get some analysis paralysis, but perhaps not with a new group!
I’ve definitely made it clear to the group that we can play on or stay where we are with one session.