Author: Rob Deobald

Hey! I just noticed the Urban Shadows play documents were updated recently, and I think there might be something missing from the Threats and Storms sheet.

The first page lists the five different types of threats and their sub-types (revolution, power play, passion, ritual and territory), but the second page only provides moves for three of the five types (passion, ritual and territory).

Loving the look of the new MC and Threat sheets. 😀 Not sure if they had been up before or if March was the first time, either way I was still using the playtest ones like a sucker. 😉

http://www.magpiegames.com/our-games/urban-shadows/urban-shadows-downloads/

The Wizard’s intimacy move! I’m hoping you guys will help me unpack it a little bit, I’m having trouble wrapping my brain around it.

Let me set the stage a bit.  Our Fae, from the Court of Bacchanalian, has a stalker- some guy who’s got the wrong idea and giving her all kinds of unwelcome attention and gifts and what not.  

During the course of the game, Urban Shadowy things happened, my Wizard got attacked by a vampire, like you do, and took a wound.

In another scene The Fae used Nature’s Caress to heal the Wizard’s harm, and no simple touch would do! The Fae chose to deliver the caress with a kiss, which we decided triggered our intimacy moves.

In this moment, the Wizard discovered that he did care about the Fae! and so, from now until the Fae gets some intimacy somewhere else, they have -1 ongoing to Escape. 

Enter our stalker a few scenes later.  If the situation gets out of hand, and the Fae wants to take advantage of an opening and bug out… they are going to have a harder time then they would otherwise.

What does that look like in the fiction? What is it about being intimate with a Wizard that makes it harder to get out of trouble?

From the Wizard’s point of view I can maybe see it pushing the trope that the Wizard would be better off alone and not caring about anybody! Everyone he cares about ends up in trouble they can’t get out of.  On the other hand, I’m having a little trouble imagining the mechanism that causes this? What has it looked like in your games? 

Our second session of Urban Shadows ran tonight.  The first post was here: http://goo.gl/vHKaTN

We still loved it. 😀

Over the two sessions, each character averaged just over one advance and one corruption advance each.

Continuing from last time, here are a few more questions and comments that came up during the session for your consideration:

Can you figure someone out on an NPC? We assumed you could, but the language of the move references player and their character, but does not mention the MC.  This could be reworded to add clarity.

Can a wizard use their sanctum / workspace to remove corruption?

Wizards cannot erase a corruption advance as an advance like other playbooks.  The player of our wizard reported that this caused him to be very cautious about gaining corruption, and therefore using magic. He also found that the corruption advances were not tempting enough to make him want to use his corruption move and make deals with the dark and powerful.

Does erasing a corruption advance also erase a corruption move? Is there a way to make this clearer on the playbooks themselves?

It felt a little awkward for our wolf to be in control of territory but not have a gang right away.  Our wolf also questioned how often his start of session move should be triggered.  If the start of session two is happening on the same days as the previous session, and he hasn’t yet resolved the previous session’s trouble, does it get triggered?

We tried out the new start of session move posted here a few days ago.  In general we liked the intention of it. (Choosing a faction that isn’t already marked was a hit!) I missed that it wasn’t a roll though.  

Debts were an awesome way to create a starting weave of tense relationships, but we found in play that they didn’t have much appeal.  It was very easy for our players to have one player offer debt, and have other players turn it down.  Going back to a point I made earlier, I think having Persuade and NPC also apply to PCs might eliminate this situation. In either case, being able to say no to a favour without consequences sucked.

We played our first session of Urban Shadows tonight.  We set the game in Toronto, “five minutes into the future”; one year after a Fukushima type disaster at the Darlington Nuclear Generating Plant had given the whole GTA a dystopian coat of paint.

Our characters were: Linsey, the Immortal who owns and operates a successful security company. Vic, the Wolf who runs a motorcycle club on the waterfront, and owes fealty to the Vampires who helped put him there.  Randall, the Wizard who’s sanctum is inside Maple Leaf Gardens, which has had a portal to a prison plane open above the old ice rink. Maeve, the Fae who has come to Toronto as part of a fairy gold rush to feed on all of the turmoil and emotions generated by the recent nuclear disaster.

Overall the response from everyone has been very positive.  People loved the way debts and the start of session moves gave us connections and enough movers and shakers to jump right in to a tense political situation.

The Immortal advanced but had no corruption. The Wizard, Wolf and Fae had each marked three of the four factions and all had some corruption, but not enough for a corruption advance.

I’m not sure exactly what you are looking for in feedback, so I thought I would record the questions and comments that came up as the session progressed.  Where I had to, I made a decision based on experience with other Powered by the Apocalypse games, but perhaps our confusions and questions will be helpful in developing the final text of the game:

-Wizards don’t appear to be able to erase a corruption advance, but others can. Fae can give Blood, Heart, Spirit and Mind a +1 as an advance, but most others can only do 3 of the 4.  Are these intentional?

-The immortal’s Duelist move makes it silly to not take a sword if you take that move.  I get the highlander reference, but why not open it up, since immortals have the option to take guns and throwing knives, why not rephrase the move “When you Unleash with an elegant weapon…”

-Will there be text in the final game regarding adjusting the pace (Less corruption before you lose your character for shorter campaigns, mark each faction twice before you advance for longer campaigns, etc?)

-Should the word “Workshop” be bold in the Sanctum Sanctorum move, or some text added under the Sanctum section to make it clearer that the Sanctum uses the Workspace rules?

-At the end of the session, if you definitely learned something meaningful about a faction, but don’t want to change the numbers, do you have to? Or can you skip the move?

-When settling your accounts at the end of the session, is this new debt on the PCs or on new NPCs, are you introducing new facts into the narrative? or building off of what happened that session?

-Will there be advice on how to introduce new players / characters into an already running game?

We are excited to play again this Friday and see what happens next!