How Mad Jay does Urban Shadows RPG
When you’re looking to change up from the dungeon, maybe something more modern, but with magic…like maybe in the neighborhood of The Magicians, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, or Harry Dresden. The Urban Shadows RPG might be what the witch doctor ordered!
I’ve run a lot of Urban Shadows at cons. That means one-shots. Two cards I keep up my sleeve:
- Everything is connected
- I have a Thanos.
During character creation I keep the generated fiction tight and I give players and extra advance and a corruption move. I will re-use NPCs, locations and events. This keeps the fiction from sprawling out of control and we wouldn’t use it all in a 4-hour span of a con event. I’ve done this enough it is second nature when I run my home games. Every NPC interaction pulls in at least another PC’s relation or concern. Tech Noir RPG does this nicely with rules for PC contacts, it is where my brain goes for new NPCs. I will try to reincorporate first, before adding a new NPC or thing to the play space.
I hack fronts from the Apocalypse World RPG. In AW they sing, they’re fun. I bastardize them for Urban Shadows. I’ll create agendas, add NPCs/PCs and put a threat clock on it with a BOOM! statement for 00:00:00. After a few sessions I start putting together a Storm. I use a Storm to know when this games series/season ends. It’s my way of “ending” a game. I look for patterns, connections in what we’ve done and reverse build a Storm — hindsight is powerful here. If I’m REAL good, I can reincorporate things from the first session and it looks like it was always there the whole time!
Debts — man, if you got’em , use ’em! My NPCs go thru debts like sweet, sweet candy. I get a kick out of bringing up why an NPC is making demands, often I’ll lead with the owe then follow where it goes. Remember, ask for the context of the debt being called in.
”Hey, I remember when I helped you with that vamp corpse? — You owe me this!”
One shots are easy, you can burn the whole city down — cause there’ll be a new city in the next session. The Storm, if I’m putting one together, is where I make the antagonist and I outline the endgame, always playing to find out. My antagonist, my Thanos is my pacing device, the raison d’etre avatar. In the early sessions there likely aren’t any stats for them. Just ripples in the fictional space, GM moves fictionally attributed to my Thanos. In the early sessions I probe for answers about this Thanos from the players during play. You know how players like to pontificate!
‘But what about the players goals?’ you say? Well, they should be pursuing them! I just make sure my Thanos crosses all those goals in some way and when the player’s look to me for answers, my Thanos is ready to SNAP!
Jahmal “Mad Jay” Brown is a polyhedral dice pool. He has written The Clockwinders for Fate, PRIME Supers for Cortex Prime and By Acer’s Light for Burning Wheel and Dungeon World. He is the host of the Diceology podcast and a GM-for-hire currently running 40+ player West Marches game at Into The Mad Lands. He likes games and stories about outsiders and underdogs. Jay games with his kids and loves his momma but she doesn’t game…yet.
