DrunkonDuty
he/him
But if you wanted to tell us about your campaign I'd be happy to steal ideas. I mean, take notes.
Urban fantasy? (that isn't WoD)
- Thread starter VelvetViolet
- Start date
But if you wanted to tell us about your campaign I'd be happy to steal ideas. I mean, take notes.
I think if I were trying to launch an Urban Fantasy RPG product line, the first thing I’d do is figure out a cool core idea. For all its flaws, WoD latched on to cool horror/fantasy concepts with inherent fan bases- vampires, werewolves, mages, mummies, etc.- and made their own take on them. And it was good enough that they hooked a sizeable audience.
OTOH, the CoC environment is centered on one of the major beloved genre fiction settings there is.
So, you’d have to find your hook.
Then, if you want sustainability beyond selling a core ruleset, I’d use a RIFTS- like approach to releases. That game has innumerable supplements, but few of them are modules or adventure paths- they’re more akin to 2Ed D&D’s box sets detailing regions. But I wouldn’t do continents, regions or states, I’d strictly limit myself to detailing cities…real or fictional.
With the former, there’s a wealth of information to grab already out there- maps, local legends & lore, culture, cuisine…
With the latter, you make it up, of course.
A well-done sourcebook on a major modern city could host entire campaigns, and provide fodder for all kinds of crossovers.
Oh, some more IP to mine:
Big Trouble In Little China
Gremlins
SERRAted Edge books
Secret History novels
Nightside series
The Prophesy
The Fades
What We Do In The Shadows
OTOH, the CoC environment is centered on one of the major beloved genre fiction settings there is.
So, you’d have to find your hook.
Then, if you want sustainability beyond selling a core ruleset, I’d use a RIFTS- like approach to releases. That game has innumerable supplements, but few of them are modules or adventure paths- they’re more akin to 2Ed D&D’s box sets detailing regions. But I wouldn’t do continents, regions or states, I’d strictly limit myself to detailing cities…real or fictional.
With the former, there’s a wealth of information to grab already out there- maps, local legends & lore, culture, cuisine…
With the latter, you make it up, of course.
A well-done sourcebook on a major modern city could host entire campaigns, and provide fodder for all kinds of crossovers.
Oh, some more IP to mine:
Big Trouble In Little China
Gremlins
SERRAted Edge books
Secret History novels
Nightside series
The Prophesy
The Fades
What We Do In The Shadows
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Thomas Shey
Legend
Probably the best way to play the core-and-supplement game with urban fantasy is start off with a core book that includes basic rules and one group of supernatural entities that can function as the core of what you're exploring (vampires, faerie or mages seem the most likely, but werewolves or something else could probably work) and then add on additional support for other types (and probably some non-playable type opponents) as you go.
In terms of successful series, most of them are either based on investigators, or unusually capable outsiders who become a way for people inside dynamically balanced social structures to do things they cannot themselves do.
In terms of successful series, most of them are either based on investigators, or unusually capable outsiders who become a way for people inside dynamically balanced social structures to do things they cannot themselves do.
Some magic items for Urban Fantasy:
”Caliber X”- an assault rifle that can magically accept ammunition made for any man-portable firearm.
Chameleon Locket: lets the wearer assume all of the visual physical characteristics of a person whose photographic image is stored within it, down to heat signature, retinal scans or fingerprints.
Stopwatch: a watch that can stop time for 15 seconds, relative to the wearer
The MidasCard: a credit card with no apparent spending limit, and is never turned down. n Nobody knows the source of the funds being paid.
”Caliber X”- an assault rifle that can magically accept ammunition made for any man-portable firearm.
Chameleon Locket: lets the wearer assume all of the visual physical characteristics of a person whose photographic image is stored within it, down to heat signature, retinal scans or fingerprints.
Stopwatch: a watch that can stop time for 15 seconds, relative to the wearer
The MidasCard: a credit card with no apparent spending limit, and is never turned down. n Nobody knows the source of the funds being paid.
Blue Orange
Gone to Texas
Easy things being easy, I wonder if you could reskin Call of Cthulhu if you are just running a personal game for a few friends. It has stats for vampires and zombies and ghosts last I checked, and you could drop sanity point costs on the non-Mythos spells (using the Grand Grimoire of Cthulhu Mythos Magic) for a 'secret magic' setting.
Jaeger: agree, network effects are huge. You need other people to play the same game, so if you find some weird indie you like you have to convince a bunch of other people to play it first.
Jaeger: agree, network effects are huge. You need other people to play the same game, so if you find some weird indie you like you have to convince a bunch of other people to play it first.
Wicht
Hero
You can indeed do that, and there are even a few Chaosium releases that provide some non-mythos style adventure.
I recall in particular the Blood Brothers and Blood Brothers 2 modules which went for b-movie inspiration over Lovecraft.
MGibster
Legend
It's not weird at all. To be dead means that the game is no longer in print or being supported by the publisher. People might still play the game, I last ran a West End Games' Star Wars: The Roleplaying Game sometime around 2005 which was about 7 years after WEG lost the licesne, but it was a still a dead game.
The reason players might care whether a game is dead or not, is because it's harder to find other players for dead games. If I post a notice at my local game store saying I'm looking to run or join a game of WEG's Star Wars, how many people do you think I'd get for a game that hasn't been published since 1998? (Not counting FFG's 30 year anniversary reprint of the 1987 version of the main rule book.) I'd have much more luck getting a game of FFG's currently in print version of Star Wars.
And is Eden Studios still producing Buffy books? I'm not even sure Eden is still active. When I go to their website, the latest news is from 2014, their online store is broken, and I'm still waiting for them to publish Beyond Human.
While my instincts would be to start off with a city I‘ve lived in, I’m thinking Las Vegas would make a better place to start.
Imagine Underhill abandoned and the Fey court moved to the American West to found a city. A city to trap the unwary. A city designed from the ground up to attract humans for the Fey to play with, baited with all kinds of things appealing to human foibles and vices. A city where time doesn’t always seem to pass the way it should, especially in the windowless but perpetually illuminated casinos.
Las Feygas, if you will.
Thomas Shey
Legend
I'd also suggest that while there's obviously some overlap, there's some big differences in tone between "Humans hunting supernatural monsters" and "People playing supernatural beings, dealing with problems originating in the supernatural community" in tone. Its relatively easy to find or adapt extent games that handle the former; as I've learned when looking around, the latter is trickier.
Blue Orange
Gone to Texas
Stephen King has the bad guys lair in Vegas in The Stand.
Now, someone do New York. Hub of commerce in the natural and supernatural worlds, and of course the city's diversity extends to supernatural beings as well.
