Category: Urban Shadows RPG: Discussion

Unleashing as a Wizard

So one of my players is a Wizard, and I suggested that they could Unleash with magic to chuck a fireball at someone (or a lightning bolt or whatever; fireball is just a specific example from the book that the Tainted does at one point). He answered that he didn’t think he could since there’s a specific Channeling option for that.

So I went back to the book for guidance, and I’m getting conflicting messages. On the one hand, there’s stuff like the above example of a Tainted conjuring fire without going full-on demon form. There’s also the Dark Arts corruption move which suggests that battle magic should be a thing. But in the playbook advice section, it says you have to Channel to cast a spell, and if you use Elementalism you then have to Unleash on top of that.

My interim judgment is that the Wizard can still Unleash with magic without that channeling option, but the Channeling option allows them finer control over the effects. I.e., with Elementalism they can always choose to deal 3-harm or 2-harm area; with general magical Unleashing the tags are in the MC’s hands. I just finished a long-running Masks campaign with him in it, so the comparison I’m drawing is that Channeling is like the Nova’s Flares: specific permissions with slightly altered mechanics, but not strictly speaking anything you couldn’t do with the basic moves alone.

How have y’all handled it? Does this scan, or do you tackle it another way?

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.