Hi guys!
I’ve created my first city (Bellingham, WA) and are preparing the start of my first Urban Shadows campaign after the Danish summer holiday has ended.
I’m not short on ideas, creativity or experience with either improvisation or PbtA.
So everything should be fine. If it wasn’t for the Factions. They tend to confuse me a bit, and therefore I seek your experience and help.
I’ve decided to allow all Playbooks, just for the diversity and freedom of choice. (We like freedom of choice in Denmark.)
My questions are …
1. Do you force players to be part of the same Faction?
2. If not, how do you handle their different interests, and how do they manage to work together?
In my version of Bellingham, Power and Night are the leading Factions, with Vamps, Wolfs and Wizards being the major forces. (I think this is a classical setup.)
Hope my ramblings makes sense, and that you will share your experience with me.
1. Nope, I encourage them to be of different factions.
2. Be ready for more than usual amount of solo scenes – make them quick and interesting.
Players will work together due to debts – to gain debt on someone out because someone else cashed in a debt with then – other player or NPC said ‘hey, you owe me, come and help out’.
As MC create cross purpose goals like two players need one NPC except that one needs him alive and the other needs his left hand, they need to cooperate to get NPC on first place then they need to sort who gets what.
A lot depends on players, if for example one players wants to become Vamp prince in town, he needs to make current prince ‘disappear’, that prince is most likely a pain for another player or two as well, so they become natural allies.
untested when players do ‘start of session move’ after they introduce rumor or conflict and roll do see what is their position, ask other players what is their standing toward that conflict – again maybe they become natural allies.
When someone is on the move throw them into another players scenes (MC move) when they missed the move or else as well ‘as you drive through town you see A on the corner talking to information broker, you also notice two guys coming out from the alley with hidden weapons, they approach A from his blind-spot with obvious harmful intentions – what do you do?’
Unlike World of Darkness the factions in Urban Shadows are in no way explicitly enemies. In a given city or situation they might be set against each other but that’s down to individuals not the factions. It is also worth bearing in mind that rifts within factions are just as likely as enmities between them.
You should have no difficulty with players who are from different factions. I agree with Pawel that you do end up with a lot more solo scenes than you might have in other games and cutting out everything but the best bit to make them short but interesting is very important.
I find that it’s better not to consider “factions” as literally being a “faction” or any sort of group bound by loyalty or duty or alliances. A faction is merely a group of entities that act similarly.
So, in my view, you could have an NPC necromancer Wizard who is actually a Night-faction-aligned character; his dark magics have made him more akin to a vampire or werewolf in aggressiveness and viciousness than the cold calculation of Power.
Within factions, I like to have intra-group conflict. There’s always a dominant group and an out-group. Sometimes I do it along class lines; there might be the rich werewolves who live in the nice part of town and go to the country to hunt, and the low-class werewolves who live homeless in the public park, and they will NEVER work together on anything. Sometimes it’s more explicitly a power struggle, such as a turf war between faerie lords.
To move to your second question, I use debts and the storm to pull my characters together. As the other commenters said above, make any issue pull on multiple characters’ needs or obligations.
Thanks so much Pawel Solowczuk, Eric Nolan and Benjamin Cooper! It was truly good advice from all of you, and it made perfect sense!