How can I make corruption meaningful in one shots or short campaigns of Urban Shadows?

11 thoughts on “How can I make corruption meaningful in one shots or short campaigns of Urban Shadows?”

1. One idea to lean more on the fictional implications: When a player rolls 6- or when there’s a golden opportunity, ask a player before you deal a hard move, “How does your Corruption make things more complicated?” That way the player is reflecting on what 1 point versus 4 points of Corruption means, and it gives the MC some meaningful fodder.

2. Tim B Interesting. I like the idea of making it meaningful during the session itself and not just at the end.

3. Have them remove a few corruption moves (2-3?) and start them at like 2-3 corruption. So basically you go bananas in 7 or 8

4. I always liked the idea of starting with one corruption move and 2-3 corruption marked. Those moves always generate corruption faster.

   I thought about giving them more moves to push them towards the fall to darkness, but too many moves can be distracting so I didn’t like that. But I never thought about just erasing some moves. Although I’m sure you could just tell them that they fall to darkness when they have only 2-3 moves left. That way you don’t limit their choices.

5. Yeah, actually I might let people play a couple of scenes and then pick out some corruption stuff. They’ll pick stuff they really want to use, then they’ll use it, then they’ll get an idea of the corruption mechanic.

   This is all assuming you want the convention game to be a representative taste of the game, not a self-contained thing. If it’s self-contained, you’re just not going to get corruption to mechanically work for reasons you’ve identified.

6. For a one shot, cross off all the corruption advancements but 2, and make them start with 2-3 corruption.

   If they really wish so, make them start with a corruption move.

   They will get a corruption move after 2-3 gains of corruption. Then, the next advancement is to ritire.

7. In a recent three session game where I played a wizard, I grabbed every corruption point I could get. I based every decision on it, and managed to max out my corruption to go out in a blaze of -glory- infamy in the final scene as the character accomplished his insane goals. So in that sense, corruption was extremely meaningful to me, because I treated it like experience points.

   For a one-shot, you could just triple the normal corruption points.

8. Seems like there are a lot of suggestions to put the players 7 – 10 corruption away from falling to darkness. That’s probably the best choice if I want to stay close to Urban Shadows as written and give a taste of what the tension around corruption might be like in campaign play.

   Then it’s up to each MC to decide how many corruption moves the players get access to at the start. I like simplifying things so I would probably start with one, but I don’t think there is anything wrong with letting them try them all out.

   I like Tim Jensen’s suggestion to triple the corruption points. Another option is to let them mark 1d6 corruption each time.

9. I think one reason I came up with that move in the initial post is that I like the push-your-luck feel and temptation that comes from randomness. Knowing exactly how much corruption you can take before you fall to darkness is not the same.

   Wether it’s for a one-shot or a campaign, I wonder if this could be a good hack:

   When you’ve taken your last corruption move, roll 2d6 each time you mark corruption. If you roll exactly the number of corruption checks you’ve marked or below, retire your character and they may return as a threat. Keep counting checks past 5 if you’re lucky enough to get that far.

   But for my next one-shot, I’ll probably stick to something like what I mentioned in my previous post.

10. Great great ideas here.

11. I always start as if they are existing characters with corruption already.

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