Hello, I’ve just discovered Urban Shadows, and I was wondering if there’s a sample adventure available somewhere.
Hello, I’ve just discovered Urban Shadows, and I was wondering if there’s a sample adventure available somewhere.
Hello, I’ve just discovered Urban Shadows, and I was wondering if there’s a sample adventure available somewhere.
Hello Paride, welcome to the community. Urban Shadows is a little different than standard games. Rather than running your players through a preplanned adventure the start to the story tends to revolve around the Archetypes selected by the players, the Debts they establish that connect them all through some past events, and then the MC/GM asks the players loads of follow up questions to flush out the city and create friends/allies/enemies/lovers/threats/factions/groups.
It’s collaborative world building. It is intended to give all the participants a sense of ownership and investment.
From there you throw the characters into situations and see where they take the story. You follow them like a reporter, asking questions and introducing some complications for them to work with.
I hope that all makes sense and sounds interesting to you.
All that being said. If you’d like to hear some of my starting scenarios from some of my games, I’d be happy to share some.
Hello, Andrew, I have with some experience with DW, and I was serching a *W game with exactly the setting of Urban Shadows (maybe plus a couple of playbooks 🙂 ), and I was expecting to find a document with something similar to a starting setup and some example fronts.
Paride, that’s more than fair. Right now we’re in play-testing and all the resources aren’t finished yet. As we get closer to release they will be more plentiful.
What sort of playbooks would you like to add?
I was thinking about some of them, but the first two very popular archetypes that come to my mind are the construct (golem or sentient robot) and the alien (the unique humanoid creature coming from some other planet or dimension and lost on earth).
Paride Papadia, those kinds of items will most likely be in the full release, but right now US is just leaving beta, so the focus has been on balance and game play decisions.
Tommy likes to make promises on my behalf. 🙂
There is no golem or or construct planned and I actually have a real hate on for aliens in urban fantasy so I will never be releasing one. lol. Sorry, it’s become a bit of an inside joke where my players tease me about aliens in U-S because they know how it gets my back up. 😉
I will however be happy to open those options up to fan creation once the game is released. That way you can make it to your heart’s content and I will be happy to help anyone who might need it.
Andrew Medeiros, sorry. The items I mentioned were MC tools and such, not playbooks. Should have clarified.
Andrew Medeiros There is also an aspect of “alone in this world” or “the last of the breed” in the alien that doesn’t imply necessarily outer space creatures, but I understand the dislike of mixing fantasy and sci-fi.
I think that there are already a lot of options, but there are never too many playbooks, right? 🙂
Tommy, that makes perfect sense. I’m glad we’re all clear now. 😀
Paride. You’re not wrong, those themes are excellent. I think if you want “from outside this world” themes, the Fae, Dragon and Tainted work really well. They all can have a built in exile in their background, which I’ve seen done before. Heck, most of them could be easily re-conceived as an Alien with little to no effort.
More playbooks are great! No argument there. 🙂
Paride Papadia, I actually disagree that MORE playbooks = more fun, as Andrew Medeiros points out, you can bend the usage of playbooks to create any infinite number of character types.
Tommy Rayburn more playbooks=more choice. IMO it’s better (if possible) having two playbooks for close themes with different mechanics, so the character skills do not overlap. In Hellboy, both Hellboy and Abe Sapiens are unique aliens, but have completely different powers, and fulfill different roles in the team.
I would label Hellboy as The Tainted and Abe and The Fae or Expert. 🙂
Well, Hellboys is 100% a devil and not of this world and Abe doesn’t seem to be considered by the faes by one of their own (actually I don’t recall reading about his origin), but that would be a close typecasting.
Andrew Medeiros thinking about your last answer made me rethink about my initial question about the example setup.
Do you see the game more as action adventure or more as a personal drama game?
Paride Papadia, that depends on the group, doesn’t it. Andrew Medeiros is in a game that from what I hear has plenty of action. I am in a group that is all politics and has had one fight in like 15 games.
My Hellboy choices were to match them up to the closest existing archetypes. Sometimes you need to ignore the default assumptions about a playbook and re-imagine it. 🙂
The game can accomodate action/adventure or personal drama. Most of my games I’m in are drama heavy with break-neck action sequences every 2nd or 3rd session. So yea, the group and MC really control that pacing.