I’d like to drift my upcoming Urban Shadows game towards a funky, Unknown Armies- like direction. You know, like a Tim Powers novel.
I think that will be easy for the Humanity and Power factions, who are basically humans dealing with the weird and unknown. I’d just need to give them some extra flavor.
But what about the other factions? I’m worried that the established body of tropes around, say, werewolves and vampires, is going to make it hard to get a fresh angle. Should I make some playbooks off limits, or have more faith in my players?
Well, if the werewolf and vampire factions are decimated and scattered, and never allowed to regroup… Problem solved except for figuring out how that would happen?
I’d have a discussion with your players. Night? Oh yeah, you could get into some interesting stuff with Night. Heck, I have a weird “eldritch horror” sort of Vamp going on now who feeds off of mirth.
And Wild is definitely the sort of thing that would slot into this: they are the weird and unknown. Moreso than Night.
I had some thoughts on this for adapting US and MotW to Divine Blood where people who were born supernatural aren’t inherently much more dangerous than anyone else with a gift like intelligence or strength. (Even most Gods and Demons aren’t anything more than the average civilian). The factions gave me a similar issue and this is what I came up with in my musings:
http://thrythlind.blogspot.jp/2015/08/divine-blood-using-urban-shadows.html?m=1
A similar adaptation for Wild and Night should work for you.
annnd that took you to the phone version for some reason. This should be the desktop version:
http://thrythlind.blogspot.jp/2015/08/divine-blood-using-urban-shadows.html?m=0
Christopher Meid But you don’t *need* to have vampires in your game, or I guess you could make the vampires an unappealing NPC group, like the Red Court in Dresden Files, if nobody wants to play a Vamp. Also, many of the playbooks can be drifted into Body Horror if you don’t want the classical movie monsters. The werewolf makes a nice Jekyll and Hyde if you don’t mind the territorial stuff.
After reading the playbooks again, and actually getting some very strong character concepts pitched to me in the recruitment thread, it seems like a non-issue at this point.