I tried posting this once, but it didn’t work apparently, so trying again.
I’m trying to run a one shot for Urban Shadows, and it’s my first time being an MC.
We’re based in Amsterdam, so I’ll need to come up with the background for the city.
My question is, how much background is enough for a one shot? Should I just make things up as we go? Should I define territories for factions and such? Should I and the players do a quick city building setup before we start the one shot?
Thanks a lot for all the help in advance!
Err I answered the earlier post this morning.
Thanks a lot. I saw your comment in my email, but not through the Google
Plus community page – it looks to have been deleted. But anyway, I
understand that you mentioned that a few minutes of setting up should be
enough to get things rolling, and I’m happy for that! In that case, I think
it’s just as simple as preparing some location names for people so that
we’re not always reaching for locations and wasting a lot of time.
The community doesn’t sort by most recent. Scroll a bit
For a one shot it is completely fine to just create characters, roll start of session move and you will have enough stuff going on.
When you get to assigning debts between PCs, ask some questions to clarify the debt so that you have some NPCs in the world and their basic relation to PCs. When a Wizard assigns “Someone is your go-to when you get into trouble” ask what trouble they’ve had recently and with whom. When a Wolf assign “Someone hired you for a job and you fucked it up” ask what was the job and who was the target etc.
Then just roll start of session moves. With 4 rumors to investigate or conflicts to handle there should be more than enough going on.