5 thoughts on “So, anyone finished and ready to give their impressions of Dark Streets?”

  1. After a light surface read: the LE playbooks are awesome. The city guides are cool, but don’t click with me for some reason – some of the stuff is interesting in them, and the threats work well for examples.

  2. Aaron Griffin I’ve had the same impression, largely. Except for the NY borough guides; I disliked them more than not. I just haven’t put words around it yet, and am sort of hoping someone else will be able to articulate it.

  3. I’m noodling it around too. I think what I want to say is that most of the city sort of comes up orgnaically based on the table, and the guide feels very much GM-centric? I dunno.

    I am having a hard time getting my head around it myself, but then again my current game is sort of run in AnyCity, USA.

  4. I think that’s a really good point. It does feel more GM-forward than table-generated.

    My issue right now is that the cities don’t feel like they’ve got a really good sense of place – especially nyc. They’ve got same neighborhood names and some landmarks, but not … the thing. Like when you’re reading a dungeon starter and there’s a brief “impression” that’s so evocative it drips? I don’t feel like there’s that. More than that, there’s no insight into the economic and power layouts that would make a political drama in Chicago feel different from one in London. What are they arguing about? What are the key resources, the power players?

    US at my table always overlaid supernatural on top of these things, not completely /instead of/. Yeah, you fought for human souls, but you also fought for where the new train line would go… because that would lift or crush an entire neighborhood economically, and impact all sorts of plans. Is my table unique in that way?

  5. I liked the NYC borough Guides and Kichijojiby–They had the advantage of focusing on a specific part of the city and what made that part unique and memorable. I was disappointed in the London Guide–I had high hopes since the author wrote a Trail of Cthulhu London city guide that I adored–but the chapter here felt like it belonged in Trail of Cthulhu and failed to capture London as a modern, ethnically diverse metropolis.

    In general, I think this book would be a boon to any game. The principles of Urban Shadows demand that the MC gives each city a unique character, and this book provides excellent tools to do that. Even MCs that aren’t using the city guides directly will benefit from the excellent examples of factions, threats, and custom moves.

    That said, each city guide depicts the city via certain themes and viewpoints. If you choose to use these to shape your setting, then it’s worth discussing what those themes and viewpoints are with the rest of your table. For example, I found the Chicago guide compelling and would love to run a game set there, but it’s very specifically Ken Hite’s view of magical Chicago which may not match the way that any individual player in my game sees the city.

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