So I’ve been reading Urban Shadows for a while and am thinking of starting up a game. I am concerned a bit about the concept of corruption. It seems that the PC gets to flex their true supernatural (etc) muscles or roll badly 30 times in the entire lifetime of their character, including taking the remove corruption move advance, before it gets retired.
That just seems kind of harsh to me. I really expected more rules to mitigate corruption than just the one advance when I first began reading up on the game.
Something like a penance move. Or am I missing something?
Do you guys find this limiting of the fun in your games or am I overreacting to how much and how quick the average character will burn through those 30 instances?
Thank you for any insight! 🙂
In my experience, you can get a full 6 sessions in before the corruption gets too heavy to ignore anymore. But it also depends on how fast the characters are progressing. I’d like to hear what other people think.
You don’t take corruption when you roll poorly.
You take corruption when you hit your corruption move, or Let It Out. You can solve problems, even supernaturally, without Letting It Out.
I have 5 players, with rotating attendance. We’ve played 18 sessions, and the highest corruption advances anyone has is 3.
It’s also worth noting: every one of my players is more encouraged by corruption than normal XP. They want to play characters tempted by the darkness and possibly falling prey to it.
Give it a try. You could always plan to do it mini-series style, 6-8-10 sessions and a wrap.
If it really feels like corruption is a thing that gets out of hand, you could make an in-game fix for it. A forgotten shrine, once restored, clears a mark or two. A quiet back-street temple has some monks that will take you in for a month and help rebalance your chi, resetting a selected corruption advance.
Whose shrine? Are there more? Is there a reason they’re untended? Do the monks have an ulterior motive? Will they just deal with anyone? Can you afford to take a month out just because you feel a bit stressed?
I play campaign that now had 21st session. I’ve always been concerned with corruption for reasons that you described. Despite playing Tainted I have accumulated a total of 12 corruption points, few for doing jobs for my patron, few for Let it Out.
However we had a Wizard who really had problem with corruption. I find it a little strange that Wizard who has corruption build into his core move doesn’t have advance to erase corruption at all. Wizard had 24 corruption at the time of his death so very close to joining the dark side.
As for Let it Out, this move is a lot in player hands, I never used it to get +1, I only ever used to to really make a show from my supernatural powers like demonic super speed or demonic super strength.
Players have a lot of control over when to take corruption from their moves or risk corruption by rolling Let it Out. However I find one factors important for Wizards or Fae who when using powers can chose between corruption or taking 1-harm ap, factor is how many days pass during your average session. We usually play 4h session for like 1 night in-game time, so very slow, in 4h session a lot of action happen so Fae and Wizards have to use their core power more often and cannot hope to take 1-harm and heal it during session. If you have this playbooks you can make more time rewinds to allow them opportunity to use their core power at a cost of harm which will be healed during the same session.
Hope it helps.
Kind regards.
We are about 12 sessions in, and one player has filled all the advances in his archetype, but nobody is even close to hitting max corruption – and that’s with The Vamp actively trying to earn new corruption moves! When they hit 10+ on Let It Out, they usually pick to not take corruption, so that extends its uses quite a bit.
I think power corrupting is kind of the point.
I was the wizard in Pawel Solowczuk ‘s game. I had so much fun playing around the temptation of power it was crazy. So many things that I could have done, but I wanted to reach my final goal (retrieving my daughter from the hands of the Elf King) before I went insane/evil.
My last move in the characters career was to Let It Out to imprison the Elf King in a magical prison. That I spent a lot of sessions building up. I had only one point of corruption left, and on a 7-9 I would have fallen to the dark side. But luckily, a 10 came up and I was able to wrap up my saga in a furious finale.
I really love the narrative tension Corruption brings into the game, as well as the sudden bursts of raw power.
How many corruption points can a character have