Urban Shadows 2e: A first impressions review

I find some games easy to grok from just reading them. 

Campaigns and scenarios I find particularly easy – I can easily imagine how they will play out at the table. (I don’t need to play Mysteries of the Ancients to see its flaws.)

Actual RPGs are a little different, but it’s usually pretty easy to see how they would play. After all, I’ve been doing this for over 40 years.

As a result, I feel quite confident writing reviews for TTRPGs on this blog without playing or running them. I’ve reviewed Good Society, Hillfolk, Most Trusted Advisors, Cthulhu Dark, Slugblaster to name a few. And usually, when I run them, they play pretty much as I expect.

But Urban Shadows?

I’ve now read (or at least skimmed) the Urban Shadows second edition rulebook. And I have no real idea what it looks like in play. So this isn’t really a review – it’s me trying to understand why I’m not “getting” Urban Shadows.

And why am I struggling with Urban Shadows? While the writing doesn’t help (it’s…overwritten), I think there are few reasons why I’m finding Urban Shadows hard to understand. First of these is that it challenges a fundamental principle of most TTRPGs: the players aren’t part of a group.

Hangin’ around together

Whether it's an adventure party or a crew or squad or school year or whatever, almost all TTRPGs have some kind of conceit that means the PCs are sticking together.

Which makes sense, right? After all, we’re all playing this game together, and the best fun is when PCs are riffing off one another. And scenes are more fun if everyone is present.

But Urban Shadows doesn’t do this. If you follow character generation faithfully, you end up with a bunch of characters who know each other and owe each other debts, but they don’t necessarily want to spend time with each other.

(I realised this while watching the start of a YouTube AP. The first 15 minutes (and maybe longer, I stopped watching) was just the GM and one character. The other players were just sitting there, silent. It looked awful… In another YouTube AP, the GM simply asked the players “Why do you guys work together,” which didn’t seem quite in the spirit of Urban Shadows. It was a one-shot though, so time pressures may have been an issue.)

If Urban Shadows were a freeform, this wouldn’t be a problem, as each player could progress their goals by talking to other players. But it’s not – it’s a TTRPG and everything has to go through the GM.

Urban Shadows recognises this problem and includes a GM principle to address it: “Push the characters together, even across boundaries” (page 201). But that only tells me that the authors know it’s a problem.

Core activity

Then there’s Urban Shadows’ core activity.  (The core activity is what the players do in the game: “You are X, who do Y.” Most TTRPGs have a core activity – and some trad games (D&D, Traveller and the like) may have more than one.)

According to the back of the book (the best place for a TTRPG to clearly state its core activity), Urban Shadows is an urban fantasy tabletop roleplaying game in which mortals and monsters vie for control of a modern-day city, a political battleground layered just under the reality we think we know. Vampires, faeries, hunters, and wizards fight to carve out a piece of the streets and skyscrapers, ready to make deals with all those who have something to offer.

Um, okay. So what exactly do you do in a game of Urban Shadows? What does it look like?

What is the core activity?

I can’t tell.

Between session zero and play

I like Urban Shadows’ character generation process.

You start by deciding which city you are setting your game in, then you choose a district of that city focus on. Then players choose playbooks, complete some nice leading questions and create some debts between each other and (maybe) some NPCs.

So far, so good. But what happens next? How does a group move from character generation to actual play?

For me, this is the critical moment for Urban Shadows. This is where everything can stall. Everything is pretty much step-by-step. Suddenly the GM needs to make sense of it all – and Urban Shadows leaves an uncertain GM flailing.

Here’s what the book says (page 235):

The players have given you a ton of hooks and mysteries to explore when making their characters: relationships that require attention, magical objects that attract thieves and scoundrels, conflicts with other PCs that are still unresolved. Grab something that interests you and bring it to bear immediately; show the players that you were listening when they said “I’m looking for my sister” or “My old mentor went crazy and disappeared.” Make your early moves soft and obvious, softball pitches that tell your players exactly what’s going on and telegraphs how they can “solve” the problem. Then follow the chaos they create!

But there’s no example here (an odd omission, given the number of other examples in the text).

Perhaps it’s supposed to be obvious. Perhaps what the players give you is enough – but what if it isn’t? What if you get all this stuff and you’re not sure how to start it? 

Examples and ideas would be a huge help.

GM advice

And the GM advice isn’t very helpful, either. It talks about not running the PCs through a preplanned plot or messing with their heads – but doesn’t clearly explain what you do instead.

What does the GM prepare in advance? Does the GM prepare anything in advance? I don’t know.

Yes, the rules explain the GM’s agendas (goals) and principles (broad guidelines) and moves (blow-by-blow actions) but I found none of it painted a clear picture of how the game played at the table – and what the GM does to prepare.

You might think that the examples would help. But they’re not as helpful as I would like – they’re very slick and don’t feel “real.” At least, not to me.

(I think we have a case of the curse of knowledge here. The writers know how the game is supposed to work, but because they are so intimately familiar with it, they can’t imagine what it’s like to be new to this game.)

What I did come away with was a sense that as GM, I would have to do a lot of improvising.

Now I can do that, but it helps to have some kind of sense of what the world is like. I find it easiest to improvise when I have a good grasp of the world, which brings me to another issue.

What does “urban fantasy” mean anyway?

“Urban fantasy” is a really wide setting. Urban Shadows features vampires and wizards and ghost and fae and hunters and more. Is this Buffy? Or Hellboy? Or Being Human? Or Harry Potter? Or Neverwhere? Or Hellblazer?

Are the werewolves like the ones in The Howling? Or An American Werewolf in London? Are the vampires like Nosferatu, or Near Dark?

This is all stuff that you create at the table, but for me, the lack of a coherent background makes improvising both easier and harder.

Easier in that I haven’t had to learn anything – I can make stuff up. (And as I hate learning backgrounds, this should be good news.)

But it’s also harder for two reasons. First, everyone may have different assumptions about the setting. If we’re not all on the same page, things can go awry and lead to frustration. Second, I don’t always remember everything that happens at the table.

Is this just me and PbtA?

It could be, but I don’t think so.

I’m not a PbtA expert and I do find PbtA games a bit weird – the terminology is often confusing and I find them arrogant; there’s a real sense that if you do things differently then you’re doing it wrong. (And that often spills over into discussion about PbtA. I’m a fan of Risus’ the “there’s no wrong way to play” school of gaming, so this rubs me up the wrong way.)

But I’ve read (and played or run) Monsterhearts, Dungeon World and Monster of the Week, and they all make sense. I can see how they work and I’ve enjoyed them at the table. They’ve been much like other TTRPGs, but I’m a fan of light rulesets.

But.

Pretty much all of the games have been convention one-shots. Most have had some kind of plot that the characters have had to engage with, and if I understand PbtA correctly, that’s not how it’s supposed to go.

And maybe Urban Shadows really is different.

I need to just trust the process

Ultimately, I suspect I just need to trust the process and run a game.

It’s on my list of things to try, but my failure to grok Urban Shadows isn’t making me want to run it.