A dark urban fantasy tabletop RPG Powered by the Apocalypse. Fight the darkness or let it swallow you whole!
This post is for backers only. Please visit Kickstarter.com and log in to read.
Hello all!
First, thank you so much for your help in making Urban Shadows a reality. I still remember Andrew coming to me back in January of 2013 to talk about this project, and it seems crazy to me that we’ve come this far!
Our campaign was an astounding success. Not only did we unlock nine City Guides (and a full companion book!), five new Archetypes, maps for every City Guide, and a short game (Los Cazados), we also raised enough funds to become the third-most funded Powered by the Apocalypse game on Kickstarter. Only tremulus and Dungeon World have seen as much support! THANK YOU!
Thank you also for your patience with us as we’ve gotten on our feet after the campaign. Andrew and I have had our noses to the grindstone working on the new draft of the rules (more on that below), and we’re excited to get you all a summary of where things are going from here...
Now that the campaign has closed, we’re going to move as quickly as we can to get the finished book into your hands. While Andrew has been taking the lead on mechanical questions and design ideas, I’m going to be the one updating you on our progress over the next few months.
Here’s where our timeline stands today:
As with all projects, we might encounter delays and obstacles, but we’ve given ourselves a decent amount of time to make sure everything gets done on schedule. Since we’ve already got a draft of the text done, we’re excited to use the time we have to incorporate more feedback from backers!
(We’ll post more in future updates about the City Guides and other stretch goals, but we hope to have those wrapped up before the end of the year!)
Toward the end of the campaign, we put up the Basic Moves 2.0 so that you all could test out the newest version of the mechanics. We got a lot of great feedback on those Basic Moves, and we’re pretty close to finished with the core Archetypes 2.0 as well.
In order to kick off our final playtest period, we’ll be posting a new version of all the Basic Moves and Archetypes by Friday, July 11th. We’re really excited to get a full playtesting packet into your hands. (There’s some awesome stuff in 2.0 for so many of the Archetypes!) The final playtest will run from July 11, 2014 to August 8, 2014.
There’s two things we want you to do during this playtesting period:
1) Play the game and give us feedback!
We’re always interested in hearing from you about your experiences with the game, especially on our G+ Community (https://plus.google.com/communities/101690788864141664454). We really value your feedback!
When we release the new materials, we’ll also ask for folks who are willing to commit to running at least two sessions of Urban Shadows during the playtest period for the same gaming group. At the end of the playtest period, we’ll send these playtesters a more detailed survey to get as much out of their longer play experiences as possible!
2) Share the materials with other people
While we’re going to release the new playtest materials to backers here through a backers-only update, we want you to feel free to share the materials with anyone you think would be interested in playing the game! We ask that you not post the materials in any public space, but feel free to give them directly to anyone you think should play Urban Shadows! We want their feedback too!
Stay tuned for the Final Playtest Update!
As with some of the other projects I’ve managed (Wicked Fantasy, Wield, etc), we’ll be using Backerkit to collect everyone’s information, take preorders, and handle addons. Backerkit is an amazing tool to help you make sure you get all the cool stuff you want (and to help us stay organized and take preorders).
Keep your eyes posted for your Backerkit invite via email soon. Once you get registered for Backerkit, you’ll be able to adjust your pledge, pick your addons, etc. You can also update your physical address, so if you move before we ship you your book, you can tell us the right address.
Thank you all again for all your help making Urban Shadows great. We’re so excited to put this book in your hands!
- Mark
We did it! Thanks to each of you, Urban Shadows is going to become a reality. We ended our campaign with $35,209, which is 1,173% times higher than our original $3,000 goal.
What a tremendous pleasure it has been to work with you all. You have been the most supportive community during this time and we just cannot thank you enough.
Over the next few weeks, we will be busy working to get the next stages into place and will keep you updated as we do, but we still want to hear from you during that time. Please send us your questions, feedback and actual play reports. Don't forget to visit the Google+ Community where hundreds of other fans have gathered to discuss the game.
https://plus.google.com/u/0/communities/101690788864141664454
The city will never be the same again. Thank you!
“Tears on the mausoleum floor
Blood stains the coliseum doors
Lies on the lips of a priest
Thanksgiving disguised as a feast”
- No Church in the WIld, Kanye West feat. Jay-Z
After three weeks of this amazing rollercoaster, it all comes to an end tonight! In less than 8 hours, the Urban Shadows Kickstarter campaign will close, and we’ll get back to all the final playtesting, writing, editing, and layout that will put the actual Urban Shadows book in your hands this fall. It’s been an incredible ride… but it’s not over yet!
Just a few hours after we posted our last set of stretch goals, you put us over the top on the final Mortal Archetype: The Scholar. Drawing on characters like Dean Corso from the 9th Gate and Wesley from Buffy, The Scholar is a mortal who draws upon their secret knowledge to hold their own in the supernatural world. We’re lucky to have Marissa Kelly, our resident archaeologist and scholar herself, creating The Scholar playbook!
But before we could even post this update, you also put us over the top on the New York City maps! Thanks to you, we’ll be including five large maps of the New York boroughs in the main book. Mark Richardson’s maps are beautiful, and we’re excited to give you a new tool to “make the darkness of the city feel real!” Next up at $35,000… maps for all the other City Guides!
Let’s be real for a second: vampires are awesome. They drink blood, live forever, and have the most amazing politics this side of Westeros. And for many fans of urban fantasy (Mark included!) one of the best roleplaying experiences ever is a kickass vampire LARP. There’s something about dressing up in crazy vampire costumes, showing up “official” events, and sneering like it’s 1995 at all the lesser vamps that is hard to rival. And that’s before the bloodthirsty politics even kick in…
If we can get to $40,000 today, we'll design and release (for free via PDF) a Vampire LARP with an old school political vibe and new school rules. We’re going to take what we know about tight game design (moves, bleed, player-facing design) and bring it to vampire larps. We’re calling it “Blood and Secrets” and we’re hoping that it brings vampire LARPS to a whole new generation of snobby bloodsuckers. Let’s make it happen!
Now that the end is nigh, we wanted to remind everyone of the extras you can add to your pledge to make sure you get everything your little heart desires while the getting is good!
We’ve received a lot of questions about how to do this, so here’s a quick summary: If you go to Manage Your Pledge on the main screen, you can manually increase the amount of your pledge in addition to the tier you had previously selected. A couple weeks after the campaign closes, we’ll send you a survey to find out which extras you want added to your order.
Softcover Book ($25) - Backers at $25+ can add an additional softcover to their order by adding $25.
Hardcover Book ($40) - Backers at $50+ can add an additional hardcover to their order by adding $40.
Additional Dice ($5/$20) - Backers at $10+ can add an additional pair of dice for $5. An additional set of 10 dice costs $20.
Retailer Copies ($12.50/$20) - Retailers can add additional softcovers for $12.50 and additional hardcovers for $20.
Dark Streets Print Edition($20) - A print version of our City Guide Compendium, Dark Streets. International backers please add $10 for shipping for this add-on specifically.
All prices include domestic shipping within the United States. International backers should add $5 per book for shipping, $10 for Dark Streets, and $5 for extra dice (no matter how many you order). International retailers should message us for shipping rates.
What can we say? After 26 days and over a thousand backers, we are excited beyond measure to make Urban Shadows a reality. But it’s more than just “a reality.” It’s a crazy, over-the-top, amazing experience to have all of you give us so much support and love. We’ve funded nine different City Guides, added maps to the main book, created several new Archetypes, and spread the word about Urban Shadows in a way we never dreamed possible. Thank you. We really, really couldn't have done this without you.
We’ve got two awesome stretch goals (more maps! A LARP!) in front of us, and we’d like to ask for you to help us make those happen. Can you post on Facebook or G+ with your experiences with the game? Or on Twitter or email to let people know we’re closing today? We love the community we've built here this month, and we’re excited to add a few more people to it before the gate closes tonight…
Once again, THANK YOU. This has been amazing, and we’re just getting started.
- Andrew and Mark
“London calling to the imitation zone
Forget it, brother, you can go it alone
London calling to the zombies of death
Quit holding out, and draw another breath”
And… that’s London! Before we can even blink, you all have unlocked the London City Guide by Paula and Steve Dempsey. We barely had time to put their stretch goal up online before you all cleared it! London will be officially added to the Dark Streets setting book!
We’ve also unlocked the Bangalore City Guide by Ajit George as well! (We can barely keep up with how quickly you all are funding these!) Ajit is really excited to get to work on (the first ever?) representation of Bangalore in a roleplaying game, and we’re extremely proud to have added his City Guide to the Dark Streets book!
We’re so excited to have both the Dempseys and Ajit on board with their international City Guides. We’re thrilled to see how the urban fantasy tropes are represented in these cities, both of which are filled to the brim with the old and the new, the ancient and the revolutionary. We’re also pumped to be able to set campaigns in these cities!
Some of our backers have noticed that we’ve added enough Archetypes to have nearly four from each Faction. Yet, we haven’t added any new Mortal playbooks… until now! If we reach $30,000, the other half of Magpie Games, Marissa Kelly (MK), will create a new Mortal Archetype… The Scholar!
Mysterious, connected, and informed, The Scholar is a mortal who has no direct powers, but knows enough tricks, traps, and cons to hold their own against supernatural opponents. They traffic in items and artifacts, using Debts to keep themselves safe in a City that wants to eat them alive and seeking allies among all the Factions. They are the keeper of the ancient tomes passed down through the ages, the watcher who tracks the monsters in the dark, and the stage magician who cons elder things into revealing their weaknesses.
MK grew up in New Mexico with roleplaying as a favorite hobby. From a young age, she was inspired to draw the characters and scenes from these stories, and as an adult MK finds herself illustrating modern RPGs as well as designing them. With her partner, Mark Diaz Truman, she founded Magpie Games in early 2011 and currently serves as Magpie’s Sr Art Director and one of its designers. She’s currently working on a game of dragons and friendship, Epyllion.
Mapping has long been a part of the Apocalypse World tradition. It’s usually one of the first things we do as AW MCs, dragging out a piece of paper to the center of the table to draw the weird stuff that fills the post-apocalyptic landscape. And in the other AW hacks (Dungeon World, Monsterhearts), we’ve found similar exercises to turn the fictional place we’re playing in into a real live map in front of the group.
Urban Shadows is unique in that the fictional places we’re using for our stories aren’t really fictional at all. Yes, we’re introducing Vampires and Immortals and Hunters, but we’re adding them as a layer of intrigue and darkness onto an existing city, tapping the history and culture and conflicts of some of the greatest cities in the world. We’re grounded in a way that makes dragging out a blank piece of paper feel a little silly.
If we can get to $32,500, we’re going to give you all a brand new resource for running your games: accurate maps of New York City that you can bring to your gaming table to mark up, add locations to, and generally ground your game in the Big Apple.
Professional cartographer Mark Richardson will be creating five different spreads of New York City, one for each of the five boroughs, to be added to the main Urban Shadows book. We’ll make them available for download as well, so that you can print the maps and bring them directly to your table.
Mark Richardson is from Ottawa, Ontario Canada. He's worked in the field of Cartography for over 15 years in the Canadian government. Last year, he created Green Hat Designs to bring his passion for mapping into the field of gaming. Mark is currently making a map for Will Hindmarch's Project Dark and recently completed work on a map for King Wens Tower by Emily Care Boss. He's also working on his first RPG design Headspace.
But New York City isn’t the only city that would benefit from a map...
If we unlock this stretch goal, we’ll have Mark Richardson add a map to every City Guide we’ve unlocked during the Kickstarter campaign. Maps for Chicago, LA, Miami, Bangalore, London, Tokyo and more will be available both in the printed books and as oversized printable PDFs available online. We’ll even make versions available that have notes from the City Guides scrawled directly on to the map, so that you can give your players an instant sense of the setting by putting a map in the center of your table.
Whew. You all keep us busy! And there’s less than 30 hours left to make all this happen! Let's get to it!
- Andrew and Mark