I’m looking to play a Scholar for my next Urban Shadows game.
I’m looking to play a Scholar for my next Urban Shadows game. I’m looking for good sources of arcane items which can be adapted for us in game.
Just wrapped up session zero of Legends of Chicago, and ended up with so much good (and twisted!) stuff to work with.
Just wrapped up session zero of Legends of Chicago, and ended up with so much good (and twisted!) stuff to work with. Here are some highlights:
Wrenfield and Harker, a law firm run by the Night faction, is looking to gentrify Tucker the Wolf’s territory, which is currently a tent city that the upper crust has mostly abandoned (here’s some inspiration he linked: http://chicagotonight.wttw.com/2016/02/09/exploring-tent-city-along-chicago-river). Tucker is a newcomer to the city, on the run from a small northwestern town and currently more swept up in the supernatural politics than an active participant.
Wrenfield and Harker are helped in their endeavor by Maura and Mallory Financial Solutions, a finance company that trades in both money and souls. The Tainted’s patron, Vito Mallory, is the CEO. They’re making deals with the rich and powerful who want to make a profit off of the project, and also exploiting the desperate poor who they’re pushing out, so they’re double-dipping in hope and misery.
On the other side, Christian and Son, the current owners of the property, are deliberately trying to keep the development from happening, but M&M and W&H are putting heavy pressure on the city to seize it under imminent domain if they don’t do something with it. Christian and Son follow the path of the Sacred Architects, and keeping that neighborhood poor and unexploited furthers their vision for the city, but there’s currently an internal power struggle over whether that vision should be changed.
So we’ve got an alliance between Wild and Night pushing up against Power, and Mortality is caught in the middle. Meanwhile, Tucker is being hunted by Captain Herrera for murdering his father in his hometown, so the cops aren’t going to be of much help.
Other characters are just as much in the thick of things, too. Krista the Witch is the daughter of the Wrenfields, former partners at the firm who died in a mysterious explosion. She’s working against the firm in order to make up for the mistakes of her family–including her own. The sacrifice that she made for her power was her unborn son, whom she traded to the Hawk, the fae king of winter.
Her son is now a fae abomination, hellbent on finding his mother no matter the cost in mortal lives. During his last such crusade, she managed to elude him, but it left her aunt Olivia bedridden and homeless, leaving Krista as the only one willing and able to look after Olivia’s 11-year old son Tyler.
And then there’s Clara the Vamp. She works for Wrenfield and Harker, a job she took when she was still a mortal, before she fell in love with a vampire named Hugo and his jealous girlfriend Rachel chased her down, tortured her and nearly killed her; Hugo turning her was the only thing that saved her life, and she still hasn’t forgiven him for it.
She’s seizing and manipulating every resource at her disposal so she can take revenge on Rachel. This has included arranging for Tucker to come into conflict with Grigori, the vampire formerly in charge of his territory, now a pariah. She’s got Tucker in her pocket, and Chett too since she’s also using those resources to help get him out from under his contract. The only person who has a real lean on her is Krista, who tries to help the poor and downtrodden–and sends any that can’t be helped to Clara. Girl’s gotta eat (emotions, in Clara’s case).
Of course, naturally Clara went digging for dirt on Krista, and now she’s squarely in the sights of her child.
Meanwhile Chett is doing everything he can to help the people he’s supposed to be hunting for Maura and Mallory. He only got into this contract because a gang of drug-running werewolves killed his sister, and Maura gave him the power and information he needed for his revenge. He’s always been on the wrong side of the law, but running people down and handing them over to demons is beyond the pale, so he helps where he can.
Which currently includes investigating the Fallen Angels. They’re that splinter group from Christian and Son with a different vision for the city, and lately they’ve engineered some locus points which are drawing out the risen dead and driving them into violent frenzies.
…Whew! That’s a lot of snowballing, and we haven’t even started playing properly yet! Stuff took longer than I anticipated, but we got a lot out of it so I think that’s all right; we went ahead and rolled the start of session stuff if that wasn’t clear already. Really looking forward to seeing how everything continues to spiral next week.
I just did the session zero for a new Urban Shadows game, and while I don’t have much to report yet I absolutely had…
I just did the session zero for a new Urban Shadows game, and while I don’t have much to report yet I absolutely had to share: The Wizard in out game is a mad scientist from another timeline, stranded in ours after she fled through a single-use gate. Didn’t even need to change any of the moves for the playbook for it to work.
I was so impressed by how unexpected it was!
How frequently should players be hitting their Intimacy Moves?
How frequently should players be hitting their Intimacy Moves? Do players try (expect?) to hit them once per session, or are they more infrequent than that?
Got a question about the Oracle’s Foretellings move.
Got a question about the Oracle’s Foretellings move.
The bit on p219 that talks about the players “retroactively declare they foresaw something as its happening”.
Like, if the players have gotten themselves in a situation where they’re being stalked by a werewolf, or I guess even being attacked, they could say “I saw this coming as part of a foretelling!”.
But on 122, for the move itself it mentions spending hold to “declare that something terrible is about to happen.” And then describes the benefit being “to avoid the impending disaster.”
This phrasing makes me think that its a stronger narrative, that it lets the player – out of the blue – declare that a car is careening toward them.
Can anyone give me some clarification or examples of how this should work?
I’m interested in running Urban Shadows, but the characterization of Factions and the way they’re baked into…
I’m interested in running Urban Shadows, but the characterization of Factions and the way they’re baked into advancement rubs me the wrong way. Long reflection below.
I believe I’ve seen this expressed in other discussions, but the idea that advancement requires meaningful (i.e. mechanically marked) interaction with each Faction confuses me. Essentially, it seems to say, “I gain experience and become a more powerful Wolf/Oracle/etc. because I know more about how everyone else works.” I understand that it reinforces the social/political focus at the heart of Urban Shadows, but I find it hard to grok a system that ties personal advancement entirely to political maneuvering, rather than personal experience. For example, Apocalypse World rewards experience for social interaction (via Hx) but also by ability usage (highlighted stats). Along the same lines, as a MC I’d be concerned about having to constantly involve members of all four Factions in every conflict, to the detriment of the story. I recall a thread some time back about a MC who was concerned by the fact that their players’ corruption advances were far outstripping their regular advances, and the advice to them was generally to find a reason to involve every Faction in every story. That’s all well and good for many stories, but I think an important aspect of exploring modern urban politics is dealing with intracommunity issues. The RAW seem to punish this interest with mechanical stagnation.
Furthermore, I feel that this mechanical feature imbues Factions with an awkward narrative reality. Because players must engage with every Faction in order to advance, and Faction membership seems to be a largely mechanical concern (a Wolf is in the Night Faction until they spend an advancement to change it), it seems to tacitly encourage thinking of Factions as actual institutions. As in, every Wolf by default thinks of themselves as sharing more in common with other Wolves (and Vamps/Spectres/Revenants) than any other kind of person. This concern has been exacerbated by both some sample US maps, which literally split up cities into four color-coded blocs connected by their Faction-ness, and Dark Streets, which does much the same thing but along social rather than geographic lines (i.e. every Faction seems to perceive themselves as a united front, like an actual fictional faction).
I somewhat like the idea of Faction “scores” to represent how well you can socially maneuver with different supernatural/mortal types, but to me it represents a more baseline social instinct than, say, being a member of the Wild Faction in good standing with much clout. In this way, I think that the idea of Factions I desire is more akin to something like Identities. I think this would also open the door to having more nuanced factions in the fiction, such as cabals of wizards and vampires or a drug ring composed of fae and their hunter enforcers, rather than the United Faction Fronts that puts all the Vamps in this corner and all the Tainted in the other.
Which leads me to my actual questions. Am I missing something core to assumptions in US, or do the game design and I simply have divergent concerns? More importantly, how can I hack the advancement system to represent a system that rewards both social engagement and personal experience, without adding new stats? My instinct is to award experience for debt moves for the former, and for the latter adapt one of the more popular PbtA experience methods (on a miss, highlighted stat, etc.), but I’m not sure which one. Moves that currently read “mark Faction” will instead mark experience. Any unforeseen snags I should look out for when I hack in this model of advancement?
Hit the streets.
Hit the streets.
Sooner or later comes the time when PCs decide that they just have enough of particular NPC and time has come for that NPC to be crossed out from the list.
Assuming that it is not a very powerful NPC, how do you handle player’s ambush on an NPC?
1. Allow them to camp outside NPC home and wait?
2. Use Hit the streets to set the scene?
– NPC having what is need can be interpreted as finding opportunity for an ambush
– juggling their own problems can be for example – a not perfect ambush opportunity, there are some others all the time nearby target, it is highly uncertain situation with a lot of variables
– cost more than anticipated means players give debt or other favor to an NPC that helped them set an ambush
How do you frame such hostile interaction between PCs and Factions where you know that violence will be involved as well as fangs, claws, clubs and guns ??
Hey, all!
Hey, all! I’m going to start running a campaign this weekend, and we’ve decided on Chicago as our city of choice. I’ve got the city guide, but can anyone recommend some good films or shows that capture the feel of the city? Never been there, and I’d like to be as authentic as I can.
Hello I’m new to running the game and one of my players (a hunter) has chosen one of his weapon tags to be enchanted.
Hello I’m new to running the game and one of my players (a hunter) has chosen one of his weapon tags to be enchanted. Is there any specific rules to this tag or any ideas on how it might work? Thanks!
Question: some of my players are ending the end of their characters.
Question: some of my players are ending the end of their characters. Does switching archetypes erase the corruption you have? Are all characters forced to die/retire eventually?