I’ve been considering using Ben Aaronovitch’s Rivers of London series (Midnight Riot in the US) as the basis for an Urban Shadows series of games.
Basically the protagonist in the books is a policeman seconded to the magical investigation unit of the Metropolitan Police in London. He has some talent for magic hence the secondment and his boss is the last English wizard. So from the getgo we have a Wizard and his apprentice. The stories feature the river spirits of London so we have a variety of Fae and Goblin Nightmarkets add to the flavour. At least one story features a ghost and other story lines feature various old /retired wizards and at least one evil Wizard mastermind. There are a race of beings that live underground, descendants of Victorian railway workers IIRC. With a little tweak or two I reckon this could work with the players being Aware, Fae, Oracle or Wizard. I’d probably drop the other archetypes as not fitting very well with the fiction.
Comments?
I see no reason Veteran couldn’t work, say a retired police officer who knows too much. Or a hunter being a police officer with a bit fa power and a lot of misplaced anger.
Besides if you want other factions in the game, make the players figure out how they fit into the setting.
I once did a dresden files game using Urban Shadows, with each sheet representing a specific character. I got to be the Wizard Harry Dresden, we had Murphy who I think was an aware, and Thomas a vampire. I think certain moves were encouraged for us to take, like elemental blast for wizard (Fuego!). You could do something similar, if you want the players to play certain characters from the setting.
Fae brings in a number things that could be explained by reflavoring vampire and wolf. Including Leanansidhe and various fae brutes. Just rework the factions so that they all represent factions of fae.
I considered a similar reworking for applying my Divine Blood setting to US.
I wasn’t going to have the players using any of the book characters, just have those in teh background or as assets that could be used, provide background that sort of thing.
Eh. In that case, I would just assume that you can work any of the templates into the setting rather than assume the only ones available are what you’ve seen.
So far the series hasn’t included demons or vampires or, I think, werewolves so I’m dispensing with those for an initial run.
I see PC Grant as an Aware moving to Wizard. I may even let the Let It Move cover his early magical spells which are limited and unreliable.
His governor is a Wizard.
Refluff the vampires as something else. There’s plenty of fae that fit the mechanics of Wolf and Vampire.
The book characters will all be NPC’s as I usually find named characters can be an issue for some players as they see them as taking spotlight time away from the player characters.