Sort of off-topic. Just a realization.

Sort of off-topic. Just a realization.

Okay, with reading Urban Shadows I’ve figured out why the idea using the rules in Monster of the Week, Urban Shadows or Monsterhearts to run a Divine Blood setting is difficult for me to get started.

The matter is one of base assumptions.

Most urban fantasy style games assumes the existence of certain conceits or tropes. I’m going to focus on three of them:

There is a fundamental difference between a normal person and a supernatural one.

Supernatural characters are regularly involved in life-and-death circumstances and used to risking their lives.

Someone with supernatural powers is inherently more dangerous than someone without them.

Supernaturals are inherently antagonistic to normals.

None of these conceits is true in Divine Blood. In fact, Divine Blood operates with conceits that oppose those three:

A soul is a soul is a soul. It doesn’t matter if that soul currently resides in a human, a werewolf, a God, Demon, is now a ghost or has not yet lived in a physical form. Their base existence is the same.

The way a brain processes data is inherited. Morality, ethics and other values are learned. As result, due to humans being by far the most populous sentient species, human morality, ethics and values are by far the most dominate even among entities that predate humanity.

Most inborn supernatural abilities give roughly the same level of advantage as being born especially tall, smart or strong. Even Gods and Demons who are connected to the vast pool of power of their kin rarely have the permission to use much more than their inherent power which is usually pretty low. Heck, most vampyr are born, live and die without ever learning what they are and simply believe they have medical issues which appear from time to time in their families.

The average supernatural of the twentieth century has never been in any situation where someone is trying to even seriously hurt them or vice versa. Most would freeze up if their life were threatened. This extends to even immortals like Demons and Gods.

Training surpasses talent. The most powerful and dangerous mortal supernatural organizations are almost entirely populated by humans that were born with no inherent talents but were lucky enough to be born to families with lots of knowledge on sorcery, magic and/or feng shui (practices anybody can learn). The most dangerous Immortals, the ones whose names appear in myths, are those trained for military, espionage or law enforcement purposes.

Most surviving supernatural species are ones that fit in with humans and work with them very well. There is nothing that “needs” to feed on humans that isn’t a self-made monster and those are rare and inappropriate for play.

All of this means that I’d essentially have to come up with completely original playbooks/archetypes. The agendas work for varying parts of the world.

For example, a Pysche freelance team that hunts beasts and witches would be easy to represent using MotW’s agenda. And a look at the intrigue between the sorcerer families or between Yomi and Nirvana or between the various secret societies like Avalon, the Path of the Golden Dawn, Thule Society and Psyche. All that would work with the agenda in Urban Shadows.

But the archetypes focus heavily on what is or isn’t human about a character and that’s counter to the base assumptions of Divine Blood which focuses more heavily on what is human about every character and the least human things are often normal, non-supernatural humans (population thing. There are far more humans thus there are far more monstrous humans than monstrous demons).