A couple questions:
1. Has anyone tried using a school (and places nearby) as the game’s “city”? I’m intending to run a short campaign set at a high school with weird goings-on, and so far can’t see any reason it shouldn’t work well. The band room where the Fae kids hang out, instead of the Winter Queen’s penthouse; the vamp homecoming queen with all the standard popular-girl retinue, instead of the vampire gang running the local drug ring.
2. Will it break things to use Unleash an Attack for verbal attacks as well as physical attacks? It makes a lot of sense for the setting. Could be with a whole new harm track, or just use the same for both.
To be clear, I don’t want to run Monsterhearts with this; strictly the same sort of story Urban Shadows is made to tell, just in a much smaller and more specific context.
Those sound like fascinating changes! I’ve never tried them, but they might work out great. Let us know how they go!
Wow, that sounds cool. Factions sound even easier to grok when I think of them as cliques in a school.
Right? They practically seem made for it.
Man, I can’t stop thinking about this idea.
But my school is a sprawling private deal with uniforms; rich kids (power), scholarship kids (mortality), “urban” kids (night), and outcast kids (fae).
Is it a school for the supernatural only? I dunno.
I’d probably pull in some custom moves from Monsterhearts, though to cover clique drama. Conditions too? Dunno
Aaron Griffin I like that a lot. I hadn’t thought to replace the Factions with cliques so thoroughly, just to have the Factions manifest in various cliques. I’m sort of afraid to pull too much Monsterhearts in, though the appeal is strongly there.
I think there’s also the danger that playing in a setting with so many stereotypes and so many tropes will lock the game into those stereotypes. That doesn’t seem to be too much in the spirit of Urban Shadows, as I’ve read it. Any ideas on avoiding that?
Travis Stodter I feel like the game has been described by the designers as about playing communities against each other, and intersecting them. I think cliquey stereotypes fits that exactly, just so you can break those stereotypes.
Why not just play Monsterhearts?
I can’t answer for Travis, but I don’t want to play a game focused on teen drama. It’s not my style. I want the game that MH warns about when someone picks a Chosen. I want a game about the supernatural with a side of interpersonal bits, not vice versa
Same. A game about teenage monsters that happen to be sexy, not driven by the sexy.
Mostly I’ve been watching too much Buffy lately. Either Monsterhearts or Monster of the Week would work well, but I hadn’t seen Urban Shadows applied directly to this purpose so it seemed an interesting experiment.
Aaron Griffin You’re totally right about stereotypes and intersecting communities. I’m mostly paranoid about my own ability to keep the game from falling into teen drama or tired stereotypes, simply because it’s easy and they’re there.