I just actually finished a game of Urban Shadows last week, which is a huge pleasure, because often (for me at least) games don’t end, they just stop. We were playing in Nashville, my home city, and had a climactic battle in the Parthenon against Alan LeQuire, tainted sculptor of the Athena replica statue there which was slowly being possessed by some sort of nature spirit. The possession was unsuccessful, but only because my Tainted’s brother showed up, the Vamp sacrificed herself to save the Wizard, and the Aware worked in the background while no-one was paying attention to her.
It had been a while since the last time we played, so I had written each of my characters a custom move to start off the final session, which is a technique I’d advise everyone to try. It’s a fun game design challenge, and really set up the final session for success. I’ve attached a link to the Google doc with those moves, if you’re curious. The Vamp one led to a night-time vampire attack when she rolled a 6-.
Something I’ve learned from this game: if you don’t have a lot of time to play in, I would recommend allowing your PCs to mark Faction if they lend a hand or get in the way of a fellow PC. I ended up doing that because our sessions were infrequent (and there weren’t all that many of them) and it was challenging for them to remember to go talk to different NPCs and establish relationships and learn about those Faction moves.
If you’ve got any questions about how I did a whole story arc, or what my fronts were, or anything like that, please ask in the comments! I’d love to have a bit of a post-mortem on this.
I’d very much like to know how you set everything up and how it all went!
Lisa Padol The moves in the Google Doc show the ones I used to start the session. As to the larger set-up, my three main fronts were as follows:
1. The Reawakening of Athena (which ended up being the main plot hook). The real-life sculptor Alan LeQuire is a tainted whose patron has asked that he help an unnamed nature spirit inhabit the statue of Athena that is in the Parthenon. This syncs well with the relatively recent bicentennial of the city. This ended up not happening because of my Vamp’s sacrifice.
2. Privatization. The Wolves in my setting are all rich families with hands in the private school system (the Ensworths, Vanderbilts, Belmonts, and Montgomerys) and the Vamps have a hand in the public school system. If the PCs had not crippled the wolves by murdering Gloria Vanderbilt outside of Prince’s Hot Chicken (the mortal arbiter of supernatural affairs), the wolves would have been able to gain power over the public school system as well.
3. NashvilleNext (named after a real policy initiative). This deals with themes of gentrification mostly – a local homeless advocacy group was fighting against the city planning office which is populated by geomancers. This didn’t go anywhere really, as the PCs managed to convince Joanna McIntyre (the mortal leader of this organization) not to use dangerous, unstable magical equipment that she mysteriously sourced.
How did things play out session to session? Or, if that’s too broad, what were the PCs like and what were their personal arcs?
Lisa Padol 5 PCs, with various levels of attendance. I have summaries of the sessions, but I’d have to dig through old Facebook messages to find them!
1. Nadia, the Vamp. She was extremely old (think around 4000, she doesn’t know exactly), and was turned into a vampire by some priest somewhere in Egypt a long time ago. Since then, she has continued to develop her web, but occasionally uprooting herself to move from place to place as necessary, but has grown tired of it and wanted to die. This eventually happened at the end of the final session.
2. Cassius, the Wizard. When he was younger, he found a mysterious crown that gave him instructions on how to cast spells by reading random books (from the Wind in the Willows to Hegelian philosophy). He was led by his crown to gather the group together for the final battle, but had a special relationship with Nadia.
3. Vanessa, the Wolf. Protector of Sylvan Park, this wolf regrettably didn’t appear that much (her player was busy with opera stuff), except she got a pack in her off-screen time that came back for the final confrontation (but was mostly murdered by LeQuire)
4. Celo, the Aware. Also not featured (except she shot the ritual circle in the end) due to scheduling reasons, but she was an employee at a local CVS that witnessed some shady werewolf stuff around the Vanderbilt campus and decided to take matters into her own hands.
5. Ophelia, the Tainted. This soul hunter was introduced halfway through the season and was aiming to find her brother. She had some awesome demonic form moments, including flying out of the Parthenon in an earlier session and being recorded by everyone at the huge picnic happening outside. Her brother ended up being the other Tainted who worked behind the scenes to make the reanimation of Athena possible.
Cool! And thanks. I do wish FB and G+ had easier ways of digging through past posts.
I currently am playing with my cousin over hangouts who is from Nashville, great game.