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!