The Urban Shadows rules have a lot of useful guidelines for running an ongoing story. Every session we do things that snowball into other things, moments that make me go, “Aha! And next this leads into this problem to be solved…” Now we’re winding up our campaign, though, and I’m hoping I can ask: Any tips for ending an ongoing Urban Shadows game?
The Urban Shadows rules have a lot of useful guidelines for running an ongoing story.
The Urban Shadows rules have a lot of useful guidelines for running an ongoing story.
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Don’t try to close every plotline. Deal with what seems important to your characters. Leave an opening for a person behind the curtain if you might want to pick something up later.
Ideas only because my ongoing game won’t be ending anytime soon:
– End a big threat and tie up loose ends as part of maybe a 3 session arc. You’ll have to stop snowballing failures into bad stuff. Hit the Streets and roll a 6-, oh that person left town on account of Throgor the Throgarian returning to this plane.
– Talk to the players, ask which PC they think might be like the “main character” on a TV show, and end it when they retire in some way
Aaron Griffin has a really important point here: turn your hard moves toward endings.
Think about the last 30 minutes of a movie or last season of a TV show. Characters are killed. Rituals happen and can’t be undone. People skip town, never to be heard from again. Plots that didn’t matter as much are wrapped up and resolved.
Endings are a time to close things down… and to make that which is the center truly, truly matter. 😀
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I actually just made a post about my recent last session without seeing your post. Something I had great success with was a) focusing on one front to bring together (in my case, the ritual summoning in the Parthenon) and ignoring the others you may have made for now and b) write some custom moves for your characters to start off the session that are more specific to the situation. If you check out my post, I provided those moves and they may be useful (or may not, I don’t know), and I found them very helpful.
That’s exactly what I did for the final session last night, in fact! 🙂 We had a couple characters who really wanted to rest up and heal before the climax, so I made a “love letter” move for everybody else to see how they spent their time off, and those results were oriented toward “you have all the info you need now to bring down your enemies.” I still needed to steer them away from holing up in sanctums or doing extra research because that’s what they like to do. It is useful to have a random ghost around to remind players that the clock is ticking…