I am fairly new to the system, and want to run “Urban Shadows” for my friends/girlfriend, however, I wanted to make one additional playbook available for them. Based on “The Mortal Instruments” I wanted a “Nephilim/Shadowhunter” playbook.
I know the Hunter basically covers their role, but I wanted a playbook that focused a bit more on the Rune-crafting, having Angel’s Blood, and using archaic weaponry over the use of ranged weapons. Can anybody help me out?
I haven’t played enough to feel comfortable hacking a playbook but I will point you to the urban shadows community on here in case you’ve not checked there.
My standard advice for newish players for any system is to just play the game as is first. Are rune-crafting, angel’s blood, and archaic weaponry things that can be fictional rather than mechanical?
My advice would be as follows:
The playbooks as they stand are pretty balanced but you get to set a lot of the flavour via a back and forth between the players and the MC.
If you think the Hunter is pretty close to what you want then use that playbook.
Change your weapons out (gun loud ranged becomes sword close messy for example).
Allow the player to flavour their actions with rune magic using ‘let it out’ and let them advance that to buy permanent ‘rune magics’.
You also might want to look at the mage instead as some of those magics might look a little like what you describe.
In the context of the story, magic and runes are separate abilities, but thank you for the suggestions!
I’d actually recommend not having a specific story or setting in mind. Pbta is best let when these things are comunally created in the first session. You’d be surprised what cool shit when you ask the mage when they cast a spell the first time “what does your magic look like and what does it work off of”
Hi, you say in the context of the story magic and runes are separate abilities. It sounds to me like you may not have realised yet that in PbtA games the narrative is pretty much the only thing that distinguishes the difference between a veteran using a rocket launcher to blow up a house and an oracle predicting an out of control bus taking out the same building.
You will almost certainly find the game much more fulfilling if you relax your preconceptions on the difference between things like runes and magic mechanically and instead, as was suggested earlier, ask the hunter ‘What does that look like?’