Writing Update and Gen Con 2022
almost 4 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
almost 4 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
almost 4 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!
Apology & New City Hubs
about 4 years ago
– Mon, Mar 21, 2022 at 06:15:03 AM
Hello, friends! We’re back with another update, an important apology, and new City Hubs! We know this project hasn’t gone smoothly, so we’d like to take a moment before we get into project updates to talk about the delays and apologize.
An Apology from Magpie Games
First and foremost, we want to apologize for the slow progress and many delays this project has seen. We have faced unprecedented challenges in the last year, both in terms of team struggles due to the ongoing COVID pandemic as well as the sudden pressure of a massively successful project we hadn’t predicted would be so big. We are a small team, and though our design teams are different, our size means that when one of us is impacted, all of us are affected.
For every case of Covid, our team had to change and adjust to take on work they otherwise wouldn’t have on their plate. The core design team of Urban Shadows has two people who are also owners of the company and their roles have had to expand and change as we faced several health crises and struggles within the company brought about by the pandemic. Even now, one of our team is facing complications from long covid, a condition which impacts all of their work and may result in lifelong health challenges.
Urban Shadows has also had an extended development time after the Kickstarter, longer than we had originally anticipated or intended. We’ve had so much amazing feedback from you that we’ve worked to incorporate it into our work, much more than we expected. While we’re grateful for this important insight—and it has made a better game in the end—those extended rounds of feedback and playtesting have caused additional delays.
We can’t express how sorry we are at the continued delays and miscommunications on effective timelines; we have tried to keep the project moving with limited resources and often misjudged what was realistic. We know many of you are frustrated and disappointed, and we apologize for how these issues have impacted you and the project. While we are working to course correct by adding on more staff (as we mentioned in our last update), it doesn’t remedy your disappointment or frustration thus far.
We also know that an apology won’t fix how late the project is. If you no longer wish to be a backer on the project, and would like a refund due to the delays, we are happy to offer one. Please email us at [email protected] to request a refund. We always appreciate your support, but we understand that sometimes a project is no longer for you.
If you choose to stay with us on this project, we greatly appreciate it! Thank you for your continued patience and kindness as we move to complete this project and get the final game to you. We also want to thank you for all of the feedback on the game, which is helping us make a much richer and more polished game than we ever thought possible.
Thank you to everyone who has backed this project and continues to be supportive, kind, and patient. Thank you for airing your frustrations and concerns while being considerate and thoughtful. And thank you for loving Urban Shadows, a game we also hold close to our hearts at Magpie Games HQ.
New City Hubs: The University & City Hall
We’ve finished two city hubs: The University & City Hall!
The University is a hotbed of political discourse, supernatural research, and strange magical phenomena. Power holds an iron grip over this section of the city—controlling the institutions that determine the city’s very future—but plenty goes on in the shadows they can’t reach. The wizards and immortals might think they control destiny, but the city’s history is often written by those with more mundane hungers…
The red tape of bureaucracy binds all; Mortalis holds sway in City Hall by knowing where the tape is weakest—and who needs to be cut to walk past it. By day, ordinary politicians do “the work” of “the people;” by night, scheming fae make deals behind warded doors and immortal powerbrokers wait in empty parking garages to have their say. You can’t fight city hall, but someone with influence can always pencil you in for the right price.
These new hubs include Residents, Relationships, Hub Moves, Locations, Rumors, Factions, and NPCs. Both have been added to the newest version of the Quickstart which you can download now from DriveThruRPG! (You might remember the University from the first release of the Quickstart!)
Progress Update
We’re working hard with our new project manager to reorganize our work. She has divided up the remaining writing and set deadlines for the additional work required to complete the book. Some of this involves editing work from the first edition, but much of it is writing new chapters that better reflect all the changes we’ve made to the second edition. As our writing team works through everything, we’ll be able to give a more honest timeline. Procuring the final art for the book has also begun!
All of the accessories (Dice, GM Screen, notebook, etc) have finished designs and we are sending them to the printer once we’ve completed the core book so they all print at the same time. This means we’ll have a complete package ready at one time, and won’t need to wait for additional pieces to ship and arrive.
We’ve also begun work on the additional playbooks that were unlocked during the campaign and can’t wait for you to see them and provide feedback!
Until Next Time…
Once we check in next month, we’ll have a more stable timeline for the final production. This timeline will be based upon the writing that we finish in the next few weeks. We don’t want to offer another timeline without substantial proof that we can meet our established deadlines; the last thing we want to do is give you another set of unrealistic dates. Thank you for your patience and we will return next month with a timeline and further progress update.
Thank you, as always, for your feedback, support, and patience on this project. We’ll be back in April with further updates, some new material, and a timeline for the remainder of the project! Till then, stay safe and keep playing games!
New City Hub and Playbook Updates
about 4 years ago
– Fri, Feb 18, 2022 at 02:18:27 AM
Happy February, friends! It’s time for another update and we’ve been hard at work diving deep into Urban Shadows over at Magpie Games HQ. We hope you’ve been having a great start to the New Year!
New City Hub: Art District
We’ve finished out the city hub: The Art District!
In the Art District, colors swirl, pop, and blister; Wild thrives here, tip-toeing the line between artistic passion and corporate assimilation. Buskers stand on street corners with nothing but their aspirations and a beat up guitar case, while the wealthy rub shoulders with overworked gallery owners and preening artists. Dreams are the currency of the Art District... just be careful not to let yours fall into the wrong hands.
This new hub includes Residents, Relationships, Hub Moves, Locations, Rumors, Factions, and NPCs. It’s been added to the newest version of the Quickstart which you can download now from DriveThruRPG!
Playbook Updates
We’ve added some new updates to a couple of the playbooks and finalized their design. These playbooks have had some significant changes, which are approved and added to the playbooks. The Hunter, Sworn, Tainted, and Vamp are the four we’ve been working hard on and are happy to say are complete.
The changes to the Tainted and Vamp are the most significant—both have new sections that help players describe their fictional position within the city. We’ve added a new pick list to flesh out the Tainted’s dark patron, and a brand new extra—a harbor—to give the Vamp a more stable home base beyond the immediate haven. We are excited to get feedback on both!
These final changes have all been added to the newest version of the Quickstart which you can grab on DriveThruRPG!
Progress Update
Unfortunately, Mark had surgery in early January and that has delayed finishing the writing as he needed time to recover. He’s doing well, and while he is still recovering, he has returned to the office full time. Work has kicked into high gear now that he’s returned. We’ve also brought Sarah Doom in as the project manager to help get things moving a bit faster! Sarah’s a great part of the Magpie Games team and we’re excited she’ll be managing the project from here on out so that Mark and Marissa can focus on finishing the writing!
One of the sections that’s next on their agenda is the faction turn rules. If you have any feedback, especially if you’ve gotten a chance to run Urban Shadows with the faction turn rules released in late 2021, please let us know by emailing us at [email protected] with the subject line: Faction Turn Feedback! Thank you!
Until Next Time…
Thank you for your support, play reports, and sending us feedback as you run one-shots and campaigns! We’ve loved all the suggestions and insights you’ve provided through emailed feedback and by talking to us in our Urban Shadows channel on the Magpie Games discord! You’re such an amazing group of backers and the game wouldn’t be what it is without you!
We’ll be back in March with more updates, information, and progress reports for you! We hope you enjoy the last bits of winter and have a great early spring as 2022 continues on! Stay safe, stay healthy, and keep being awesome!
