Urban Shadows Carnival of Shadows
We concluded our US game last night with the death of two main characters and only one of the characters remaining with the circus.
The premise of the campaign/chronicle/story was a traveling circus set during the great depression of the 1930’s. My intent for the story was to travel from the American dust bowl during that period up to the New England states and move from the familiar horror of scarcity into more Lovecraftian horrors. It simply did not play out that way and we had a better story for it.
I will admit that my love of games Powered-by-the-Apocalypse has most to do with the conceit of “playing it out” which means that my story and direction are only as important and my fellow players, the player characters. In any RPG it is fairly easy as a GM/MC/DM to force player characters into situations of your choosing because you can hold them hostage and refuse to move the story forward until they fall into your line. By the way, don’t do this or you will find yourself GMing a game for yourself and those people are called writers. Instead, I want my player characters to have creative control in hopes of creating buy-in on their stories and mine.
For playbooks we populated our game with the following
Maria Mendez – Acrobat – The Spectre
Mendez found herself in the eternal employment of the circus upon her death in a “freak tightrope accident” after she had decided to leave the circus before the game started. She’d been a ghost for about six months. Her story was one of a person trying to find herself. She was Alice trapped in a horrific wonderland with little chance to escape until she created the opportunity. She saved her friends multiple times, traveled the horrific landscape of Carcosa, was the unwilling pawn of an old god and instrumental in the destruction of a usurping demon. In the end, she left the circus and haunted this world by her own devices including the ability to play the pipe organ that was thrust upon her with fae magics.
Ulysses Abrams – Stage Magician/Ring Leader – The Wizard
Mr Abrams was on the run from something or someone when he joined the circus with his magical supplies and a curious looking mirror. Over the course of the story we learn very little about Abrams except that he is educated, has many contacts but is rather solitary as wizards usually are. He saved the circus from an onslaught of hungry ghosts, hunted down demons, made deals with fairie kings, and threatened an entire gathering of mortal hunters with open warfare. In the end Abrams was killed in a fight with a usurping demon. His final curse was to shackle the demon to the circus for eternity.
Spielzeug “Ziggy” – Freakshow Contortionist – The Vessel
The word “Speilzeug” means toy in German which says a great deal about this character. The vessel playbook is a constructed being like a golem, Frankenstein monster, or supernatural robot in Spielzeug’s case she was a beautiful plant construct created by the former circus ring leader Mr Schikert. Mr Schikert was a wizard who wanted a mate and placed his hopes and desires into Speilzeug expecting her to simply love him. She rebelled, made poor choices like consuming demon’s blood, got captured (so much that it became a cliche), helped many people, loved who and how she wanted, and always found herself greater than the adversaries which she faced. In the end, she passed trying to finally kill a usurping demon.
Landon – Circus Clown – The Tainted
Landon has always been with the circus. Always. Our resident nightmare fuel was Landon the demon clown. Landon had a code of his own that was only internally consistent. He began the story a servant to Amon-hotep, The King in Yellow, and was a very willing and capable subject. It was only when Mr Schikert was slain that Landon’s relationship to the demon god changed; he was cursed to never satisfy his patron. Landon then devoted himself to the fae by courting the fae king of America’s daughter (who’s character truly formed from one of the players impersonating Veruca Salt from the original Charlie and the Chocolate Factory). We will always remember Landon’s entraces as they were often X carded after about a paragraph of description. He was an exploration of body horror that never failed to horrify at least one other person at the table.
Our story wound from Kentucky northward into Virginia with a stop in and around the nation’s capital, Washington, and from there up to Pittsburgh and the small towns between. There were vampires, ghouls, zombies, ghosts, wizards, templars, oracles, freaks, and fanatics but none of them held a candle to the plans and actions of the PCs. Since Urban Shadows touts itself as a supernatural political drama you do open stories that are not simply based on violence and horror. I also attempted to infuse as much supernatural wonder as I could. Mr Abrams’ magic mirror was noted on my factions sheets under Wild but the populace within
was Night.
I never wrote love letters for the players due to a lack of inspiration and time on my part. Thankfully, each player brought a great deal of story with the start of session moves. We instituted a house rule of when a player rolled to “figure someone out” it would mark the faction target’s faction for advancement. This helped to ensure that characters were advancing at the expected rate as a stationary single-city story. I feel that this worked out well and could be a usable house rule for any MC who feels the PCs are not advancing as often as they are comfortable.
I will re-iterate that I really enjoyed this story for Urban Shadows and it does work as a traveling story so long as MCs listen and develop goals/actions for the NPCs which will show up.
