Urban Shadows 2nd Edition review — feeling the weight of ambition

Urban Shadows’ vision of city-based fantasy horror sets a dense web of relationships and obligations. Playing as a creature of the night (vampire, fae, werewolf, etc.) or several shades of mortal investigator, this game will taunt you with power while weighing that power down with debts and threats. While both its themes and Powered by the Apocalypse mechanics pull from familiar sources, there’s no mistaking Magpie Game’s eye for focus and layout. This review will feature some minor quibbles with the writing and presentation that shouldn’t distract from an overall welcome and well-considered core book, which makes its rules easy to approach.

I’m going to make a statement which sounds contradictory but you will find isn’t (should you read this review instead of skipping to the score at the end): Urban Shadows 2E is a good, high quality game that I strongly recommend, despite the fact that I don’t like it at all and don’t see myself ever playing it. That preference has to do with the way Powered by the Apocalypse games see their mechanics and narrative, which is a great thing for the people that want to play games aligned with those ideals.

Book Details & Presentation

Before getting into the meat of the mechanics and writing, I can say the core book itself has a lot to recommend it. I read the pdf version at 322 pages with a black/purple color scheme that oozes style without sacrificing readability. The variety of scenarios and peoples presented sell you an almost great urban horror vibe that gets your head right in the game. I say almost great because the art direction has one consistent problem that drags down many art pieces: the faces. I don’t know what it is or how it happened, but people’s faces in this book have a disturbing uncanny valley effect. The cover is a clear exception, but everywhere else in the book they feel off, disconnected from the context around them. My one guess is that they used real models which didn’t fit in with the otherwise artificial, fantastical art pieces.

The book features a concise but effective hyperlinked table of contents. That table and the index are both a single page, but the array of tables at the end of the book more than makes up for it. Thank you Magpie, for understanding how to make a dense text like this usable in game. The Appendix contains an easily readable set of rules reminders, basic & other Moves, listing of playbook advancement, tons of specific triggers for player or GM use, item and tag lists, equipment, and random tables for generation. It is lacking in the kind of basic rules summary that I think would be necessary for this appendix to feel complete, but as a PBTA game, almost all of those are covered in the moves themselves.

Mechanics: the highs and lows of Powered by the Apocalypse

Mechanically and philosophically, this is a Powered by the Apocalypse game, which brooks a discussion of what that phrase means and how it affects the design. I’ve referenced PBTA before and played more than a few games, but as this is the first time I’ve done a formal review of a PBTA game, it’s time to dig into the subgenre. Owing its name from D. Vincent Baker’s Apocalypse World, these genre of games share a few basic mechanics but are mostly bound by principles by which players interact with the world and games.

At its most basic, PBTA and Urban Shadows break their mechanics into Moves, which are similar to but distinct from skills in other games. Characters have four attributes which provide bonuses and penalties, and Moves task you with rolling 2d6 plus or minus attributes and appropriate modifiers. 1-6 is a failure, using the “fail forward principle” by which failures always move the plot forward. 7-9 is a mixed success, whereby you succeed with some complication for the future. 10+ is an outright success, with no drawback.

The difference in PBTA vs. “traditional” RPGs is in their narrative focus, as brought out by the Moves. Moves differ from skills in a few subtle but crucial ways. They aren’t so much broad areas of knowledge as they are specific types of things a type of character would reliably engage in. Instead of Insight or Empathy, Urban Shadows has Figure Someone Out. Moves have triggers that are more narratively specific as opposed to generally applicable, with listings of their effects based on your roll. General rules are very simple, 2d6+modifiers, but break down into the many Moves for yourself, your faction, your debts, and the city itself.

The effect this makes on PBTA games is to break down the many things a narrative is supposed to consist of into a series of predetermined Moves. They don’t have mechanics that model a situation, creating verisimilitude for your players; rather the Moves provide a focused narrative which builds itself around those Moves, creating a more guided path of how the narrative will proceed.

Is that a good or a bad thing? That depends on your personal preferences. The benefits are obvious: the game is super easy to learn, with all of your options right in front of you and a story with reliable tone and themes. PBTA games structure themselves directly around an intended theme or plot, and make for easy to GM, procedural interactions based on those themes.

As that focus is the main benefit, it is also the main drawback, for people like me. Being less charitable, I find the PBTA guard rails too restrictive and brute force. With little to no mechanical variation, all you’re doing in game is making a series of similar rolls. Moves are not supposed to be things that players think about and structure their actions around, but with a series of buttons in front of you with specific narrative triggers and effects, my experience is that players do exactly that. Compared to something like World of Darkness’ more general attribute+skill system, I find the freedom lets players interact with the world more organically, without the structured guard rails of Moves.

As an example, I’ll pull from another of Magpie’s recent releases in Avatar Legends. It adapts Avatar with nearly no mechanics tied to bending itself. Rather the game’s interest lies in a push-pull between character’s sense of balance between conflicting ideals, and how that affects their mental health and personal relationships. It forgoes complicated combat rules about bending, with almost nothing at all tied to the setting’s most unique, interesting feature. Rather, its extremely detailed combat system, indeed most of the rules and Moves, are built around maintaining or losing that balance.

To some people, this is great. They aren’t interested in game mechanics describing the specifics of fire bolts or wind speed, and feel the meat of the game is its conversations. I find the limitations of powers narratively interesting but the balance more intrusive. When playing, a friend’s character suffered a major loss. I went to talk to him and ask how he was doing, only to trigger the “Comforting a Friend” Move which interacts with the balance track. I found this unwelcome and intrusive, but that’s as someone who is already a practiced roleplayer, and doesn’t need prompting to be emotionally attached to the story. That isn’t a dig at people who like PBTA or an implication that these games are overly simplistic; it’s just an acknowledgement that PBTA deliberately uses its rules to guide you to certain interactions and outcomes. I often find that stilted and artificial, but the actual quality of Urban Shadows and its ilk is often high, and they know well how to create those interactions.

Layout & General Writing Quality

This book’s writers took care to keep things concise and readable…mostly. Concepts rarely take more than a page or 2-page spread, and the general concepts are encapsulated in quick introductions with bolded terms.

As a player, all you really need is a playbook to know how to make your character and get into the game. Playbooks function as general classes/archetypes that decide your character’s goals, methods, and general characteristics. The playbook design is a great feature, saving a lot of effort getting things moving. At the same time, it can slow things down in game, with everyone having access to different Moves, Corruption mechanics, and maybe special features of their playbook. There’s a lot of text on the page which sometimes modify other moves, so getting a quick understanding of your capabilities can be difficult. It all comes down to these longer, complex descriptions. But at least they’re right there in front of you.

These playbooks are, like a few parts of the book, a little overwritten. Learning the difference between a Hunter vs. Sworn takes digging into the moves, because the explanatory paragraph at the top of the page has too much vibe and not enough actionable information. A few bullet points would get it across and create more freedom than these paragraphs of prose. This comes across in the Moves as well, with thematic names that obscure their actual function. Walk through walls is “Wall, What Wall?” Again, the point is to differentiate itself from a D&D-esque spell, but that can go too far.

That comes across in the rules as well. Generally this is well organized and written, but bluntness could help cut this book down without sacrificing tone. Explaining mechanics isn’t complicated, just 2d6+modifiers across three sets of values. In fact, all of the rules are like that. They’re pretty concise, not hard to learn, but spread out a bit by a lot of explanations. That all said, the Appendix is such a great resource for (most of) these rules that many players will not need to wade through the prose to learn the game.

Character Options

Most decisions are made for you by way of the playbooks. Names are thematic, but too much so. There are times when you need to reference book concepts, like the Wizard’s spell components, but for the most part everything you need is contained on the sheet itself.

Your attributes are Blood, Heart, Mind, and Spirit. Is it just me or are these not all that clearly delineated? Blood and Heart seem to be related but what are they here? It’s all in the Moves, so you’ll rarely need to contemplate the philosophy of it.

The Playbooks consist of The Aware (mortal investigator awakened to the truth), Fae, Hunter (working with a society of similar hunters), Imp, Oracle, Spectre (with special traumas/anchors), Sworn (defenders of order, working with a higher power), Tainted (possessed), Vamp, Veteran, Wizard, and Wolf. If you ever wanted to play a mixed-splat World of Darkness game without learning all the extra rules, here you go. Everything in one package, months to years before Curseborne is out.

The playbooks have their own moves and drawbacks, all well tied into their general concepts, as well as special Corruption triggers. Powerful but dangerous, Corruption sees your ambition rewarded and punished at once. Letting yourself be pulled too far to the darkness, like by ignoring mortal connections to deal with the supernatural or suffering from dark afflictions, you will gain special abilities for marking Corruption but step ever closer to losing your character forever and seeing them turned into an antagonist NPC.

The other major character feature relates to Circles, and where you fit into the game’s setting and power structures.

Circles, Debts, Factions, & Combat

Circles are general spheres of power, containing their own factions and schemes. Every character has Status in the four Circles of Mortalis (humans aware of the supernatural), Night (creatures of darkness like vampires or ghosts), Power (those who have gained power through deals or research), and Wild (faeries and demons). Gaining Status in one Circle decreases Status in another, forcing you to choose where to build and sacrifice relationships.

Your interaction with Circles and their factions are broken down into Moves, at the Circle or City level, depending on your Status. The intended gameplay loop sees you having adventures which get you more power that unlock new moves that let you play the grander game of grabbing power throughout the city.

Faction turns happen over time in which the NPC factions respond to you or one another. It’s a helpful tool to teach new GMs to run a story. This will guide organic things as factions respond to actions by the characters and build a living city. Factions have very few stats but that’s a good thing. They don’t need to be complex. This is a set of reference notes, not a combat NPC.

Playing into that Debts are a mechanic which sees you trading and managing obligations to many parties. As you can see below, they carry a lot of weight, both mechanically and narratively, playing into the larger game of thrones, or in this game, city council seats.

Combat is very simple and limited. You only have 5 HP, functionally, and you can take one of the limited Scars (permanent attribute damage) to avoid damage. Scars are supposed to be big serious moments for your character. At the end of the day, as the book says explicitly, it’s very hard to kill a character. There are only 4 weapon tags, that’s just not what the game is about. Your character is basically only supposed to die if you decide it as a narrative moment, not a natural consequence of combat being dangerous.

The book rounds itself out with some sample settings and generous GM advice. While welcome, I don’t find either particularly necessary. Urban Shadows is so good at creating its intended game experience that you may not need the help creating it.

PBTA tops out of its power relatively fast, but that’s the point. Rather than a 4 year long game of Vampire which sees you from Neonate to Prince, Urban Shadows would shake out faster, with less mechanical growth. All of that growth is tied into important narrative moments. There are fewer dice rolls and level ups in PBTA because they are built to punctuate specific narrative developments. It does that well, and the only question for you is whether you appreciate the way it approaches and encourages those developments.

Review Guidelines75

Urban Shadows 2nd Edition

Good

Urban Shadows 2nd Edition is a focused horror/fantasy game, letting you explore the consequences of seeking and obtaining power, weighed down by the debts and needs of your relationships. It has all the typical focus of PBTA, for better or worse, and despite a few drawbacks in its presentation and design is one of the better examples of the subgenre.