Category: Urban Shadows RPG: Discussion

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?