Category: Urban Shadows RPG

Hello! Prepping for my first campaign with US after several years of running EotE campaigns. We’ve been doing stuff very narratively, so I decided to suggest we move to something more narratively focused and everyone agreed.

Typically, I do a lot of world-building for my campaigns. I run a custom setup for them that I called cooperative world-building, not too dissimilar from US’ character creation. Everyone went in a circle naming NPCs, places, etc and how they connected to both each other and to the players. Not necessarily building out plot per-se, but building up the world, crafting these key NPCs and places, and deciding on some basic motivations/goings on. That would always be our entire (3-4 hour) first session. From there, I’d figure out how things in the world would work, define new connections that were logically necessary, and decide how important events would unfold without PC intervention so I’d have some better ideas as to how things will advance in the campaign based on what the players do. Only THEN would I start to craft one bit of plot at a time, in more typical adventure-writing style (these turned into something akin to ‘clockwork sandboxes’ as I got better, where the players had a loose goal and almost unlimited freedom for accomplishing it). This seems to click pretty well with US’ clock/threat mechanics, where the only thing I cut out is that very last bit and just fly by the seat of my pants session-to-session for story.

Which sounds great, except that contrary to my typical approach US seems to heavily suggest you start playing in session 1 and keep the world creation a bit simpler than what I described above. Due to said prior experience I’m not totally confident in my ability to just ‘go’ based purely on the cooperative world-building we’ve done on the spot, and not confident the world will feel ‘complete’ enough without the ability to sit and think about the world for awhile after that first session.

Now my question. Am I worried for nothing? Should I go ahead and do character creation flowing straight into play, and just deal with the details after? Should I do some pre-prep of my own that I can use or throw out depending on what the players come up with? How much work to other GMs out there typically do with regards to building out their worlds?