Chapters Update & Dice Preview
about 2 years ago
– Fri, Oct 28, 2022 at 01:48:02 AM
Happy spooky season, friends! We’re excited to be back with an update for you all! We apologize we were quiet last month–we’ve been heads down working on Urban Shadows. We delayed an update so we could come back with an update on where we are with production, a breakdown of what that means, and some previews of what’s coming soon!
We have been working diligently to move chapters of the book forward, expanding our team in house to include multiple writers and editors and providing writing sabbaticals to the writing team to give them more time to write. We know the project is very late and many folks are reasonably frustrated. We continue to apologize for how long this project is taking and offer refunds to those who no longer wish to support the project. Email us at [email protected] if you’d like a refund.
Chapters Update
We’ve made good progress on the book over the past few months, and we’re happy to say that the structure of the book has been finalized and most of the chapters, including the largest chapters in the book, have finished writing.
As we head towards completing writing and pushing everything through editing, we’re ready to move to providing chapter by chapter updates. This way, you’ll know where everything is in the process, what that process is, and what to expect next for each section. Thank you to everyone for your feedback on what we’ve shared so far; we appreciate your patience!
There are five key parts to the process of finishing the book: on hold, writing, developmental editing, copy editing, and layout.
- On hold areas are waiting for the rest of the book to be done. They’re the last bits of information that go into the book, like credits and the introduction, and so will be the last to go into the writing phase. Usually these are done in layout, so they are completed quite quickly.
- Writing involves the writing team creating the chapter, both through writing new material and using previous text from Urban Shadows: 1st Edition to create a cohesive chapter. There are a lot of new features in 2nd Edition, so a lot of the writing is being done from the ground up.
- Developmental Editing is the process of an editor going through a written chapter and leaving notes for the writer, restructuring the chapter, or adding parts that are missing. This process involves going back and forth with the writer to get the piece to be the best it can be. This phase only occurs when the text is complete, and indicates that the piece is close to completion.
- Copy Editing only happens once development is done. Copy editors go through the text to ensure that all grammatical, spelling, punctuation, and style errors are caught and corrected. They’ll also catch any continuity errors and ensure that all terminology is properly notated.
- Layout takes the text from the copy editor and puts it into the book. Layout artists spend hours perfecting the look of the book, integrating the artwork, formatting the text, and ensuring a cohesive overall product. They also set up the layout of the book before importing text so that the team can approve the overall look.
Below, we’re giving you an outline of each chapter, which phase of completion it’s in, and what all has been completed. We’ll be doing this monthly until all chapters are moved into layout. Once all of the chapters are in layout, we’ll be able to give you a firm timeline on how long it will take from there for the book to be finished.
Urban Shadows Chapters
- Front Materials (credits, opening, etc) - on hold
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Chapter 1: Introduction - on hold
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Chapter 2: Cities of Shadows - writing
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Chapter 3: Fundamentals of Play - writing
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Chapter 4: Character Creation - copy editing
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Chapter 5: Core Moves - developmental editing
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Chapter 6: Playbooks - layout
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Chapter 7: Advancement - writing
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Chapter 8: The Master of Ceremonies - copy editing
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Chapter 9: Long-term Play - developmental editing
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Chapter 10: City Guides - writing & developmental editing
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Back Material (play aids, index, etc) - layout
We expect the status of all these chapters to change before our November update. In that update, we’ll give you the same breakdown for each chapter as above, so you can track the progress we’re making. We totally hear that you all want more detailed feedback on our process, and we’re thrilled to share this with you now that we’re so close.
Progress on the rest of the book is going well! Our graphic artist is working on the various layout elements within the book so that the layout is ready once copy editing is complete. Our art department is working on procuring art resources, some of which will wait until the layout is complete so we know where art is needed in the final product. We’ll keep you posted on this as it progresses!
Sneak Preview of The Spectre
Our layout artist, as we mentioned, has been hard at work deciding what the book will look like with our art team. Together they are creating the overall aesthetic of the book, defining how each chapter will look, and integrating layout and content. This process is a very fiddly one! For example, moving from the condensed play materials in the Quickstart to the full presentation of the playbooks involves preparing more than 70 pages of text!
We’re excited to share with you a preview of what that Playbooks section of the book will look like for The Spectre. This is close to the final layout for the Playbooks within the book and contains the information that explains each element of The Spectre playook, its moves, and features . The team is extremely excited about the direction the layout is going and can’t wait until we can put all of the book into layout. Check it out!
Dice Preview
We also have received preview samples of the dice! You can see that some of the image edges are rough or a little jenky because these are laser-cut prototypes. The Urban Shadows text logo dice aren’t coming out well, and so we’ll be changing the design on those for the final product.
Despite the changes coming on these dice, we wanted to give you a sneak peek to see what they’ll look like!
Until Next Time…
We’re so incredibly grateful for your support, despite the delays, and your excitement for the game. Urban Shadows is near and dear to our hearts and we’re continually thrilled with your feedback, engagement with us in our discord, and your incredibly thoughtful insights into the game. We hope you enjoy a spooky Hallowe’en and stay safe!
Pin Preview and Updates
over 2 years ago
– Fri, Aug 26, 2022 at 02:39:10 AM
Hey friends! We hope your summer has been lovely; we’re excited to be back with an update! We missed the end of July because we were headed to Gen Con and it was an all hands on deck situation! Thank you for your patience!
Project Update: Writing Continues
Our team is hard at work wrapping up chapters to get them into editing. Specifically, we’re going over the old text of 1E and then adding and improving with all that we’ve taken from internal playtesting and what we’ve heard from you, our excellent community. We’ve learned a ton from great discussions here on posts as well as in our Magpie Games Discord where folks deep dive the rules and give really great feedback!
This feedback has deeply impacted how we explain the basic moves in Chapter 5, how we explained character creation in Chapter 4, and most importantly, helped us develop the GM chapter (Chapter 8) because making better tools for the GMs is a huge part of ensuring the game sings. This past month, we’ve been focusing on expanding the explanations of the basic moves and including the edge cases we’ve seen pop up as you all playtest.
So, that is to say, that writing is continuing. Writing updates aren’t all that interesting, because the best we can say is here’s what we’re working on and that work continues. We appreciate that’s not the most exciting update, but we want to assure you that the writing is going well and our writing team is working diligently to ensure that you’ll be delighted by what you read and that your influence will be clear when it comes to each chapter.
Other than the writing, we’re excited to say that the dice, dice tray, journals, and pins are all headed to print or at print right now! The GM screen art is complete, as we’ve shown you, and we’re working on putting in all the important information on the GM facing side before we go to print. We will definitely get feedback from you all on the GM Screen before it’s finalized.
In fact, we’ve gotten in some samples for one of the pins just this week. Check them out below!
Let it Out: 1E to 2E
For the past few updates, we’ve included some design discussion to help explain some of the main work we’re doing to update the game. This month we thought we’d spend some time discussing one of the major changes to the basic moves: let it out, version 2.0.
The original let it out was a powerful tool that gave GMs and players the flexibility to adapt the powers and abilities of the characters at the table to each fictional moment, but… it often turned out to be harder to use in practice than it sounded in theory:
When you let out the power within you, roll with Spirit. On a hit, choose 1 and mark corruption. On a 10+, ignore the corruption or choose another from the list.
• Take +1 forward on your next roll
• Extend your senses, supernatural or otherwise
• Frighten, intimidate, or impress your opposition
• Take definite hold of something vulnerable or expose
The theory here is that a vampire can let it out to rip a car door off (taking hold of an object that was vulnerable to their super strength) while a hunter could let it out to disarm a rival (taking hold of a weapon that their hunter “training” made vulnerable). It’s a great all-purpose move, one that balanced the chance for corruption against a broad array of powers and abilities.
But… it also required a good degree of mental gymnastics on the part of the players. They had to decide they wanted to use the move at an abstract level, then look at the outcomes to see if maybe they could make those outcomes fit, then roll the dice (hoping for a hit!) and then pick from the options. When you escape a situation, you are thinking about the trigger and what you want from the obvious outcomes of the action; when you let it out (in 1E), you have to hold both the trigger and the options in mind, authoring your abilities in the fiction without any guidance!
The new version of let it out gives up that flexibility for a set of specific abilities, such as the Oracle’s “frighten or impress someone with knowledge of their past” or the Hunter’s “improvise a weapon (2-harm hand messy) or armor (1-armor fragile)”:
When you let out the power within you, choose an ability from your playbook and roll with Spirit. On a hit, mark corruption and activate the ability; the MC will tell you how the effect is costly, limited, or unstable. On a 10+, ignore the corruption or the complications, your choice.
Now–rather than doing the mental gymnastics of selecting a set of abstract options, players instead look to their specific abilities tied to their playbook. If one of them seems helpful, then the roll is really about determining the efficacy (full or partial) and the cost (corruption or no corruption). The playbook abilities do limit things a bit, but offer players a concrete set of prompts that clue them in to stuff they can bring into the story right now!
Thank you to our GMs!
A huge shout out to all the amazing humans who joined us at Gen Con 2022! We ran over 300 games at Gen Con and many of them were amazing sessions of Urban Shadows 2E! We got some great feedback and had a marvelous time meeting folks from our community and welcoming new people to our games!
Thank you to all our fantastic GMs who joined us and ran the heck out of the convention! You were all amazing and we’re so grateful for all your hard work!
Until Next Time…
As always, thank you for your continued support as we move ever forward on the project. We’re making great progress and are excited for when we can show you all the writing and art together! Stay tuned, friends, and we’ll be back next month with some great updates!
Writing Update and Gen Con 2022
over 2 years ago
– Fri, Jul 01, 2022 at 04:38:08 AM
Hello all!
Our apologies for the late update this month! We’ve been hard at work pushing forward with writing and editing Urban Shadows 2E, but we wanted to make sure we kept you all updated.
Project Update
Writing and editing continues on the core book! This month has been quiet as we’ve worked on finalizing the GM chapter for editing, as well as developing the text for the new faction turn and status mechanics released last month. We think that the GM chapter of the original 1E text was a standout part of the original book, but we’re taking a hard look at it to make sure that it’s both streamlined/improved and reflective of all the changes that were made to 2E, such as adding information on running games for the Imp and the Sworn and detailing how to make use of the City Hubs!
While part of our team is dedicated to those GM tools, other writers are working on finishing the text for the moves, including all of the Circle, Debt, and City moves. US2E has a ton of tools—each of which kick in at different times and different levels of abstraction—and we want to make sure each tool is thoroughly explained with examples. Again, some of this text draws on existing materials for moves from 1E, but we’re making sure to review and refine everything.
Refusing to Honor a Debt: Status vs. Heart
Last time, folks were really excited to hear a bit more about the design philosophy behind some of the changes to the game. So… this month, we thought we’d talk a bit about one of the big changes to 2E: changingrefusing to honor a Debt from Heart to Status!
In 1E, refusing to honor a Debt relied on Heart, allowing playbooks like the Fae to be really good at keeping their creditors at bay. But the addition of Status for 2E—reflecting each character’s relative position within the hierarchy of the city—gave us some new tools for thinking about what makes a Debt hard to refuse. Is refusing to honor a Debt a function of personal persuasion or political power? The latter seems much more in line with the game!
We also loved taking the idea even further and invoking relative status—the difference in status between the refuser and their creditor—to determine the roll, but we worried that Heart would no longer be as valuable. Most stats in Urban Shadows are attached to two moves (Blood is used for both turn to violence and escape), but Heart is only used for persuade! Would Heart characters be diminished by the change to Status?
Of course, symmetry isn’t always the most useful lens; we want each stat to be equally meaningful, but the moves aren’t always equal in their spotlight time. Persuade is uniquely powerful in Urban Shadows—it’s one of the few ways to resolve a conflict that doesn’t spin out into new conflicts. When you mislead, distract, or trick other characters or turn to violence against them or escape the situation, those conflicts tend to follow you; persuade allows you to come to deals that might actually resolve things (sometimes). Heart, it turns out, is plenty powerful and important all on its own.
Changing refusing to honor a Debt to Status required us to think carefully about balance, but it also gave us new ways for characters to advance and develop. Want to wield more power in the city? Up your Status. You not only get access to stronger City moves; you make it harder for people to avoid your Debts…or make you honor the Debts you owe them.
Join Magpie Games at Gen Con 2022!
Team Magpie will be headed to Gen Con in Indianapolis Indiana in August! It’ll be our first convention where we’re back to running games and we’re excited to see everyone! To that end, we’re looking for GMs to come run Urban Shadows and some of our other amazing games like Avatar Legends: The RPG, Root: the RPG, Zombie World, and more!
All our GMs get an awesome swag package that includes a game of their choice from Magpie Games. If you run 4 or more games, you’ll also get a badge to the convention! If you’re up for volunteering, and want to join Team Magpie, please fill this form out:
https://forms.gle/rdAvjUsAC9ahqAgp9
Until Next Time…
Thank you for all your patience and support. This part of the process is slow and steady, and we’re on track to hit our goals over the next few months. We’ll share more when we can, but please remember to send any feedback you’ve got to [email protected]. We always appreciate hearing from Urban Shadows backers!
Quickstart Revisions, Writing Update, & GM Screen Art
over 2 years ago
– Fri, May 27, 2022 at 01:50:18 AM
Hello, friends! It’s time for another update! We’ve been working hard over at Magpie Games HQ, and we’re here to let you know all the things we’ve been plugging away at! Let’s jump in and see what the city has to offer!
Updates to the Quickstart
We continue to update the Quickstart! We know it’s not the book…but we’re hopeful these changes will continue to give you more to play with as we work on getting the final book together!
The new Quickstart will be in your library on Drivethrurpg if you already downloaded it or if you haven’t, you can get it here: https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/333500/Urban-Shadows-2nd-Ed-Quickstart
This month we’ve added some new mechanics! You can check out the city moves for Status-2 and Status-3 characters. These moves expand the influence PCs can have in the faction turn, allowing them to marshall faction forces, lay claim to assets, recruit new allies from other circles, and even claim Status-3 for themselves!
The new quickstart also includes some playbook updates as well. These are dev edits as we polish the playbooks and prep them to be in the final book. This update has some slight changes to the Aware playbook—including revisions to their moves to really make them sing—as well as a new spell (Trinket) for the Wizard! We can’t wait to hear your thoughts about the revisions!
Project Update
We continue to work through the chapters one by one. Some of these chapters are now headed to editing, while others are being written and revised to send to editing. These are some of the first chapters we’ve moved to editing, and we’re excited to say that the chapters are coming along nicely! As we finish writing and editing, we get ever closer to layout!
We’re also making great progress on all of the accessories! In the next few months we’ll have samples coming in from our prints; once those are in we’ll be able to start showing you what the dice, pins, and other accessories look like!
For now, we have an amazing piece of art we want to share with you that is for the GM screen! This stunning work will be the back of the GM screen! Check it out!
Replacing Perform a Ritual
In the last update, we updated the faction moves and replaced perform a ritual with search the city. There were some questions about why that change was made…which is a great opportunity to talk a bit about how moves evolve over time!
As you might recall, perform a ritual was originally a move that was only available to Power factions…but it quickly became clear that there are situations in which non-Power factions might want to get their hands on magical assets directly or perform magic rituals. By opening up the Circle-specific moves to all the factions, we made the faction turn much richer!
But we also exposed that perform a ritual is working at a different fictional level than the other moves. Goading an opponent into making a mistake covers many fictional actions—running a con, openly displaying a weakness, a false flag attack—but performing a ritual is just one thing—doing a ritual!—a fictional action that has a lot of overlap with consolidating control to gain Strength and assets.
In general, moves with that kind of overlap have problems—it’s either not clear which move applies or the “stronger” move ends up being a dominant choice. Strong moves inspire diverse action with diverse outcomes, which is why we want a straight attempt to gain assets to focus on consolidating control, and we want to give factions new tools for searching the city to gain assets, find information, etc, in ways that don’t directly address improving their strength. Your factions can still perform rituals… but now the question is are they using that magic to consolidate control or search for information?
Until Next Time…
As always, we’ll return in a month with more progress reports and insight into what we’ve been working on. We appreciate that writing updates aren’t the most exciting, as there are limited things we can share with you besides saying that writing is happening, but it’s important to us to let you know that we are working on getting the final version of Urban Shadows 2E to you! We’re grateful for all your support, excitement and continued feedback on everything!
See you in a month, friends!
Quickstart Updates & Progress Report
over 2 years ago
– Sat, Apr 23, 2022 at 05:12:00 AM
We’re back, friends, with another update for Urban Shadows! We’ve been working hard at Magpie Games HQ to push forward on this project and are excited to share some of that work with you!
Updates to the Quickstart
The Quickstart has been updated with more content and edits! We’ve been reviewing player and playtesting feedback and working on the core material. The Imp playbook has changes to a move and an extra on their playbook, plus we changed the name of the faction move from perform a ritual to search the city, and clarified how weakening someone’s status can affect factions.
These changes are to help make game play more fluid, and as always, are based on the amazing feedback we’ve been getting from you! While we are working on making the best game possible, we love getting your feedback and incorporating it into the design and writing! We really can’t thank you enough for all your insight, both on the Kickstarter, through email, and through discussions on the Discord!
You can join the conversation on Discord here: https://discord.gg/RUFWCbC
Progress Update
As we promised, we’ve been hitting the writing hard and working diligently. To this end, we’ve added more people from our team to the writing and production team for Urban Shadows. These writers will help get the book to you faster, are all deeply experienced with Urban Shadows, and are excited to be joining the project!
We’ve assigned the unfinished chapters out to our new team members and everyone has been working steadily to get Urban Shadows into your hands! With these new team members and progress moving steadily, we believe we should have the game PDF in your hands by this Fall. We know that’s several months away but we don’t want to make another promise we can’t deliver on.
Once the PDF is done we’ll be tackling the very difficult task of printing. Right now, the world is a mess when it comes to printing because of massive paper shortages. We are already working to figure out the best options for when the PDF is ready to go to print, but there may be printing delays because of these shortages. We know we’re not there yet, but it’s important to keep this in mind as we get closer to printing.
Until Next Time…
We’ll be back next month with where we’re at, what’s been done, what’s in the pipe, and what’s upcoming. We’re excited at the progress being made, our new writers, and the work everyone is doing to bring you the best possible game we can. We really can’t thank you enough for your support and kindness as we navigate the project and move forward!
As always, thank you for being amazing backers and helping us make Urban Shadows 2E come to life! We hope you’re staying safe, healthy, and playing amazing games with each other! Till next time!
