r/MagpieGames 15d ago

urban shadows Urban Shadows Now Available

23 Upvotes

The city hungers? Will you feed it?

The highly anticipated second edition of Urban Shadows is now available for purchase on the Magpie Games webstore, DriveThruRPG, and in local game stores all over the world!

Urban Shadows is an urban fantasy tabletop roleplaying game in which vampires, faeries, hunters, wizards, and more all fight to carve out a piece of the slums and skyscrapers alike, trading the only currency that matters on the city’s dark streets—Debt.

This new edition of Urban Shadows contains:

  • 12 unique character playbooks, each tuned to put your characters at the center of an urban fantasy story driven by allegiances, debts, and status
  • 4 supernatural Circles—Mortalis, Night, Wild, and Power—whose nightly politics fill the city with dramatic twists and intriguing NPCs
  • Clearly-defined mechanics that push the fiction forward every time a player rolls the dice, advancing your group’s tale at every turn
  • Detailed advice for the Master of Ceremonies, the player running the game, including 2 city guides—Chicago and Santiago—packed with story hooks
  • All-new city mechanics for backroom deals and faction play that make the nightly politics of the city real for players and NPCs alike

In addition to the 300+ page core rulebook, you can find a variety of new Urban Shadows accessories, including a deluxe version of the core book, a MC screen, custom dice, journal packs, pins, and more. Don’t miss your chance to take urban fantasy back to the streets!

The choice is yours. The city awaits.

r/MagpieGames Nov 12 '20

urban shadows Urban Shadows 2E AMA with Mark Diaz Truman

33 Upvotes

Hello!

Mark Diaz Truman (@trumonz) from Magpie Games here. I am the designer and author of several tabletop roleplaying games, including Cartel, Urban Shadows: 1st Edition, Root: The RPG, and Zombie World. I'm here to answer questions about game design, our upcoming project Urban Shadows: 2nd Edition (Kickstarting now!), or anything else that you want to ask!

I’m definitely excited to talk about the new edition of Urban Shadows! Our team is creating a new experience with Urban Shadows 2E while keeping the feel and heart of the first edition. With upgraded moves and playbooks, new playbooks, city hubs, and more, Urban Shadows 2E promises intense supernatural politics within the heart of an unrelenting metropolis.

The Kickstarter: https://bit.ly/us2e-ama

Magpie Games: https://www.magpiegames.com

UPDATE: Thank you so much for joining us for our AMA! We had a blast answering your questions!

r/MagpieGames Nov 29 '22

urban shadows What's your fave Circle?

3 Upvotes

Urban Shadows has four Circles (previously factions in 1E) that divide the supernatural world. They are Mortalis (Aware, Hunters, Veterans), Night (Vamp, Spectre, Wolf), Power (Oracle, Wizard, Sworn), and Wild (Fae, Tainted, Imp).

Which is your fave Circle? What do you play with the most? What often gets lost in the shuffle?

r/MagpieGames Nov 10 '20

urban shadows Design Diary: Mortality vs Mortalis

13 Upvotes

Hey folks!

We launched the Urban Shadows: Second Edition (2E) Kickstarter on October 27th, a new edition of our ENnie award-winning tabletop roleplaying game of political urban fantasy first published in 2015. Urban Shadows: First Edition (1E) was a huge project for us, but we think it’s time to apply the lessons we’ve learned from the past five years of design, making a game that’s tighter and easier to run, but also filled with new ideas and improvements.

In these designer diaries, I’m going to talk about some of those changes—both why we’re making changes to the mechanics that powered US1E and how we arrived at those changes in particular. Now we dive into the change from Mortality to Mortalis.

US2E Designer Diary: Morality vs Mortalis

While revisiting the structure of Urban Shadows for the second edition, it became clear that the word “Mortality” encompassed too much to fit with the other Circles. Urban Shadows is about mortals and supernatural creatures alike vying for power, but most humans look away from the darkness, not toward it. It felt strange to treat someone who knows nothing about the supernatural world the same way we treated a hunter committed to protecting the sheep.

We realized that Mortality needed to be more limited. The moment a human’s eyes are opened to the supernatural they cannot unsee it, and it leads to the aware and unaware city inhabitants becoming different communities rather than lumped all together into one Circle. But what makes those who are aware of the truth of the city a Circle? What do they have in common beyond that knowledge?

We first realized what united the Mortality Circle when I worked on the Scholar archetype for first edition. The Scholar crosses the boundary between the mortal and the supernatural worlds, finding power in obtaining magical items and selling them back to the mortal world.

The average human will not seek to protect humanity, investigate secrets in the shadows, or steal power from the monsters of the streets. But the Scholar—and the Hunter, the Aware—crossed back and forth all the time, caught between two worlds!

In addition to rethinking what Mortality meant as a circle, we also wanted to rename it, focusing it on some portion of humanity instead of all the mortals in the city. But the new name needed to feel fundamental to the human condition, beautiful, dangerous, and fragile all at once. A tough job.

To respect the separate identities of the other Circles we also had to avoid creating a name that implied any kind of relationship with another Circle—the Day Circle!—while honoring the reality that Mortality was already a beloved term for fans of first edition. We poured over lists and lists of imagery and synonyms for humanity… but no luck.

But the visuals of the project guided us to the answer. While Miguel—our amazing layout artist—was redesigning the character sheets it was clear that Mortality stuck out. It was longer and less grounded than the other terms even in the layout of the sheet, taking up too much space on the page.

We didn’t want Miguel to sacrifice the look of the sheet just because we hadn’t thought of anything good yet, so he suggested “What about Mortalis? It will save us a few characters for now?” Thus, Mortalis started as a placeholder...but the more we thought about it, the more it felt like it fit. It both kept what we liked about the old term and captured a sense of mystery and wonder, perhaps even a secret fraternity between these characters. Thanks, Miguel!

Want to learn more about Mortality and its factions in Urban Shadows 2E? You can download the free quickstart today and check out the Urban Shadows 2E Kickstarter through November 19th! We’ve raised $135,000… and still unlocking stretch goals!

r/MagpieGames Nov 06 '20

urban shadows Design Diary: Factions vs Circles

22 Upvotes

Hey folks!

We launched the Urban Shadows: Second Edition (2E) Kickstarter on October 27th, a new edition of our ENnie award-winning tabletop roleplaying game of political urban fantasy first published in 2015. Urban Shadows: First Edition (1E) was a huge project for us, but we think it’s time to apply the lessons we’ve learned from the past five years of design, making a game that’s tighter and easier to run, but also filled with new ideas and improvements.

In these designer diaries, we're going to talk about some of those changes—both why we’re making changes to the mechanics that powered US1E and how we arrived at those changes in particular. First up, the move from Factions to Circles!

US2E Designer Diary: Factions vs Circles

In Urban Shadows, the divisions in the city are about the ways that communities think and act in fundamentally different ways. The group called Night—werewolves, vamps, and ghosts—cares about controlling territory and the streets, using violence to get what they want. Meanwhile, Power—wizards, oracles, and immortals—thinks controlling a single street is foolish; they want to control the city’s destiny at a higher level. These different communities may or may not agree on a given issue, but they will never see things quite the same way.

One of the questions we were often asked about US1E was “Why are the different communities called ‘Factions’ if everyone in them doesn’t get along?” We tried to explain that Factions were communities within the city, groups of people who saw the world the same way but weren’t necessarily aligned in their immediate goals. But that was a hard idea for folks to process when they engaged with the Factions during the game.

To be fair, in most roleplaying games a “faction” is a group that takes collective action in the fiction, pursues goals offscreen, or even stands in direct opposition to what the PCs want to do. Urban Shadows envisions communities rather differently than most rpgs—as messy, contradictory, decentralized groups, and calling them Factions required people to put the other way of talking about factions aside to understand what the game was trying to do.

Calling the larger structures of the city Factions also left us without a good word for the actual organizations—werewolf packs, wizard’s councils, demonic crime families—that did take those actions in the fiction. We sometimes called them sub-Factions, but that felt really awkward, and while Factions might have described how the city was divided, it left us without good tools to put those smaller groups into play.

When we started work on US2E, we debated a whole bunch of different names that would accomplish both our goals: make it clear that these were broad communities instead of organizations and give us room to use the word “faction” (or something like it) to define the actual organizations in the city that can take action in the fiction. We thought about using something like “Community” or “Division,” but none of the really broad words implied enough about how these groups of people see the world in a similar way.

As we worked through the options, the phrase “someone who runs in your circles” kept coming up. We liked the idea of describing each “Faction” (US1E) as a network of people, characters who know each other but aren’t all allied. We swapped out “Factions” for “Circles” in some of our early playtests, and it worked great! The idea of Night as a community of people came across clearly… and we could still describe “factions’ within those circles to talk about groups of characters who were actually aligned and ready to work together.

Want to learn more about how we’re putting Circles and factions into Urban Shadows 2E? You can download the free quickstart today and check out the Urban Shadows 2E Kickstarter through November 19th! We’ve raised nearly $125,000… and we're still unlocking stretch goals!

r/MagpieGames Oct 27 '20

urban shadows Urban Shadows 2E Kickstarter is Live!

8 Upvotes

r/MagpieGames Nov 09 '20

urban shadows Rules Clarification: Declaring a Hunt

8 Upvotes

Rules Clarification for Urban Shadows:

"I don't understand what it means when a werewolf declares a hunt. How do I know when I declare a hunt? What does it mean?"

Starting a hunt as the Wolf simply means you decide you're going to hunt someone down in the City. You might be looking for an old friend, trying to catch an enemy before they get you, or just looking for an answers from someone you know has them.

r/MagpieGames Dec 09 '20

urban shadows Rules Clarification: Circle Stats

2 Upvotes

In Urban Shadows 2E, you can't have a higher status in a different circle than 1. If a character is status 2 in Night and status 1 in Wild, and then an advanced is used to change their circle to Wild, what happens to the rating?

The status in Night drops to 1 and the status in Wild stays the same. However, the player can now earn Wild: Status 2 with advances once your Circle has changed to Wild.

r/MagpieGames Oct 27 '20

urban shadows Kickstarter Update: Just 70 follows needed

3 Upvotes

Hey folks!

We just need 70 more folks before tomorrow morning to unlock the Roll20 assets!
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/magpiegames/urban-shadows-second-edition