Hello awesome community! I’m back with another US question that I’d love to explore.
The scene: a fae Lovecraftian morality play is coming to an end. The major players in the web of intrigue we’ve built over the last eight games are all here, and the PCs have prepped for it the past couple of days: securing alliances, doing research, scraping together some weapons… they’re ready.
During the Big Fight, the Wizard seals the deal with an unseelie fae (+1 corruption for deal with a dark power) to achieve the dread “Upon A Pale Horse” corruption move. The Veteran spends a hold to have “just what you need” and whips out the true name of the vamp that she and her assistants have been researching for days to find.
Wizard + true name + Upon A Pale Horse + 2 corruption = 6 AP harm to the big bad. Night night!
My players knew that a lot of narrative threads were getting tied up in this fight. They also knew that we would be taking a Urban Shadows break to play around in Fate-land (Dresden? Secrets of Cats? We’ll see!), so this was Season Finale time.
The way we would continue this, narratively, is that the Wizard is persona non grata for just outright blowing someone he doesn’t like away. No one will see him face-to-face anymore. That’s some super dark stuff that’s gonna pull that Wizard down down down in the coming months.
I’d love to hear from other people about how they handle this particular corruption move in their groups, what kind of narrative pressure/consequences comes to bear on their Wizards, if/when/how the MC uses that move against the players to turn it back on them..? Any and all. This particular move seems like a Very Big Hammer to swing around and I’d love to get some perspective on its use.
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Sub since I haven’t seen it come up–although, preliminary thought is that the narrative pressure wouldn’t be terribly different from that reaped by the myriad other ways of just full-on killing someone.
“Oh, so Marv can kill someone just by speaking a word? Big deal. Nikki the Vamp’ll put you in the dirt just as fast if she gets her fangs in you. My dead cousin Marv can give you an aneurysm and you’d never even know he was there. I’ve got Reno the Hunter on speed-dial, she’s got a whole library full of ways to kill you and a van full of bullets to do it with. And don’t even get me started in the Wolves.”
It doesn’t matter that the Wizard can kill someone; anyone can, and characters like The Hunter have it as their entire shtick. It doesn’t even necessarily matter that he did kill someone, in general terms. What matters is who he killed, who that person’s friends and enemies were, and how those people are going to react. For everyone else: unless they have specific ethics about not using that kind of magic, I don’t see them treating the Wizard much differently aside from filing him in the ‘dangerous bastard’ box. And if you refuse to do business with every dangerous bastard in the city, you’ll never get anything done. Just have some other dangerous bastards in the room with you when you talk to ’em; that’s good policy anyway.
I like that answer. I think part of my hesitation around this move (and damage-dealing moves in general in AW I think) is the fiat portion of it. My instincts might fall too hard on the initiative-roll-to-attack-roll-to-dodge side, but I have a very hard time turning to one of my characters and saying out of the blue, “A fanged monster leaps from the darkness and rends you with its claws, dealing 3 harm. What do you do?” Even if I made soft “you hear growling” moves before, it feels weird.
The alternative is to wait for them to attack in more “traditional” combat settings; even then, I don’t think I’m doing enough to make it exciting enough? Or narrative enough? “I do 3 harm… and I guess I’ll choose ‘get harmed back’.” I can spice up the description but it feels like I’m not providing enough agency in combat.
This probably comes down to the majority of my role-playing experience being in systems with more, uh, systematized approaches to combat. This did succeed in convincing my players that toe-to-toe shooting at people is not a good idea — which, y’know, is a good real person non-sociopath realization to have.
One of my moves I use a lot is to inflict damage when people disregard my warnings. Like this:
Mark: That vampire has his claws out. Before you realize that he’s angry, he leaps at you, his claws outstretched toward your eyes.
PC: I shoot him!
Mark: Okay, but remember that he’s midair; he’s already in motion. If you just stand there and shoot at him, he’s definitely going to hit you.
PC: I’m cool with that.
Mark: Great! He slashes at your face. Blood splatters on the wall next to you. Mark three harm and give me an unleash roll…
Unless there’s already a hard move on the table or something, I’ve personally never really liked requiring that players do an extra defend-y type roll when the combat move already includes avoiding reprisal as a potential outcome. Doubly so in Urban Shadows, since Keep Your Cool is based on Spirit and that means that Hunters are counterintuitively pretty crappy at it (note: I think it’s cool that Hunters are better at causing trouble than getting out of it; but one-on-one fighting like this still feels like it should be in their wheelhouse of competence). I’d just have them Unleash, and if they get a 10+, good job, their shot stopped the vamp in their tracks or they managed to sidestep it or whatever. Outside of that specific kind of situation, yeah, I think dealing damage when they ignore warnings is a good way of doing it.
Back to Upon a Pale Horse, though: yeah, I assume that invoking someone’s true name in an incantation like that takes long enough that, at the very least, any goons hanging around have a chance to react and go to town on you before you can do it twice. If for no other reason than I imagine true names are appropriately long and/or difficult to pronounce. I mean, if they have the fictional positioning for it, they can let it rip (same as they could with a gun if they found a safe sniping position, say), but barring that, expect the same difficulties you’d have when pulling a gun on someone.
James Etheridge – Totally up to the MC and the level of danger. Never something I would advocate for all the time, but it’s a tool for the toolbox. (And notice in my example that it’s a PC choice. I like the idea that the Hunter isn’t great at avoiding the consequences of their hunting… like Daredevil or Batman, there’s a lot of broken bones…)
And yes! I don’t think a true name is easy to come by nor is the incantation particularly quick…