I finally had a chance to go through the book last night and I found the Factions and Debts particularly interesting, so I was curious how they’ve played out for different groups.
How have the two influenced an Urban Shadows game in a way that might not have come up in, say, World of Darkness or Dresden Files?
Faction in particular seems ripe for emphasizing overall theme and a sense of “sides” in a vague conflict – and open to redefining under other names or loyalties.
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Well, I’m pretty new here myself, and only have a couple of sessions under my belt, but:
Last session, I had a golden opportunity I used to add in a group of vampire knee breakers who tried to roll a club the PC’s were trying to infiltrate. I selected vampires on the fly because a) I have a vamp PC, and b) nobody had marked off night yet. This gave them an opportunity to Put A Name to a Face and so on.
Would something similar have happened in another game? Certainly could have. But by incorporating a faction as yet unmarked, I fulfilled an agenda of keeping the players lives not boring, and made the world feel political.
We’ve yet to really dig into debts, so I can’t really contribute there, yet, but hopefully that helped.
Cool, thanks for sharing! I love seeing how rules subtly influence decisions in games.
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Derek Guder I wouldn’t say they SUBTLY influence. I’d say they overtly influence. Could be a “just my style” thing, but I’d go so far as to say “it’s the whole point.” The rules are meant to set-up situations that require the characters to wade in. The characters need to mark each faction to advance, and since we’re fans of the characters, we want to see them advance, so it makes sense to incorporate factions we haven’t seen in the story yet.
Corruption should definitely be on your list, too! I firmly believe that the MC should be freely offering up situations left and right which enable the characters to accept corruption. I’d even go so far as to say that if the playbook’s corruption move doesn’t at least tempt the player to use it, they’ve picked the wrong playbook. Don’t force them down the PC’s throats, mind, but just keep sweetening the deal- make the situations more and more personal and desperate. Temptation, and choice, are key.
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Corruption is certainly interesting, but feels like a more traditional force with an expected outcome. My curiosity there is how long PCs will survive, since those powers create a type vicious cycle.
The Factions and Debts are the elements that I think are much more distinct from other games, particularly in the genre.
Debts speaks directly to what many games in the space say they’re about or characters engage in, but it’s almost never codified. Vampire in particular loved to dance around it but there was always a break between mechanics and themes, there.
Factions in particularly curious about how literal people have taken them – and if anyone has reskinned, rearranged, or just flat-out changed them for their games.
I’m doing some campaign design now, and I think that how you organize each of the Factions can be a big deal.
For example, if you say “Mortality is organized – hunters have turf and a communications system, the Aware have a bunch of private tumblrs and a psychic drug ring, and they feed info to the hunters through secure channels” that makes Mortality a very different type of Faction than if you say “Mortality is buffetted around by their own passions and perceptions; those that rise above the mass are always clinging to some piece of jetsam related to a disaster in their life caused by the supernatural” even if the characters that you put into the two Factions are the same. It also means they will relate to each other differently.
When the game says “treat everyone according to their station”, that means you have to pick out what the stations are and how they relate to each other. If Mortality is fairly flat in its “organization” it will respond to upstarts differently; perhaps with pity rather than seeing them as disruptions. Whether a formal organization (a Wizard’s Council with every Oracle assigned a Wizard’s apprentice keeper to sort through their visions and make sure their electrical bills stay paid) or not, it works both ways.
I am thinking for my game that I will probably have at least one hyper-hierarchal Faction and one flat-as-Nebraska Faction, for some good contrasts.
Cool. Let us know how it goes.
Has anyone messed with changing the factions, either actually renaming or re-arranging them, or just changing what the default assumption is around them?
I’m only running my first Urban Shadows session this weekend, but I must confess to an ulterior motive: I’m on the hunt for a way to run In Nomine with rules I like better, and this game seems like a good fit.
If I wanted to keep four factions, the obvious adaptation would be to split it into Divine, Infernal, Mortal, and Ethereal. I wonder if it would fit the setting better to split it up based on the Words represented by specific Superiors, though – Judgment, War, Gluttony, etc. It might even make sense to group Words from both Heaven and Hell into conceptual groups, since the “War faction” of Heaven probably has more in common with its counterparts in Hell than with the “Peace Faction” on either side.
I’m really curious to see how the original factions actually feel in play, and whether altering them would “break” the game in any way.
Using it for In Nomine is an interesting choice. It occurs to me you could have fun with play books for different angelic orders. Are you planning on doing much rules modification? How are you planning on handling superiors?
I’ve been tinkering on and off with a bunch of different ways to hack In Nomine for awhile, so the short answer is just “TBD.” I figured I’ll run Urban Shadows first as-written and just enjoy it the way it is before I think too deeply about hacking anyway – looks like an awesome game in its own right!
Actually, this thread and the rule book have been helpful in getting me to think about what each faction values and represents in Urban Shadows. I had originally envisioned vampires as having businesses to cover their criminal operations, for instance, though I’m learning that wealthy companies in big glass buildings are more Power’s realm than Night’s. So what does that suggest about the relationships between factions? Do the vampires rely on wizards to bridge the gap between the streets and the skyscrapers when it comes time to launder money? Does a vampire crime boss buying up legit businesses to expand his control represent an incursion by Night onto Power’s turf? Fun questions, whatever the case.
Yeah, this is the kind of stuff I was originally asking about. Interesting possibilities when you start to map factions to the city. I guess it would depend on themes you want to push. Maybe ask players for one or two NPCs per faction and see where that takes you.
Definitely let us know if you do anything with In Nomine, as well. I’ve been thinking about how it’s due for a revival, but needs a new system.