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!
