Urban Fantasy general discussion thread

[VelvetViolet]

There are too many low or unpowered people for the average supers game to handle. I've considered Hero System, since it's the one that does street level the best, But I no longer feel like teaching it to new players, and the prep time is too high in play.

Have you tried Scion from Onyx Path?
@aramis erak

There’s also Hero’s Journey: Hero's Journey: A Tabletop Roleplaying Game

 

[Crusadius]

There is also City of Mist in the urban fantasy genre.

 

[VelvetViolet]

At this point in time, what I want to do is explore my creativity and design more “night worlds” (as Night Shift names individual settings, not necessarily horror-oriented). Or go further and design smaller modular bits that can be dropped into an existing compatible night world.

For example, I had an idea for a night world that centered around the well worn theme of monster hunting, but with the further (also well worn) twist that PCs could be half-monster themselves. Monsters are evil by definition, but a PC option was a minority of monster victim refugees who retained their humanity and weren’t completely corrupted. Dhampirs who rebel against their inner vampire, reluctant werewolves, witchcraftsmen who resisted the allure of magic, abductees who have escaped fairyland, antichrist candidates that don’t want to start the apocalypse, lucid spirits that haven’t succumbed to bitterness over their deaths, etc.

 

[VelvetViolet]

Has anyone tried Monte Cook's The Strange, Invisible Sun, or whatever he produces that is urban fantasy-adjacent?

 

[aramis erak]

Has anyone tried Monte Cook's The Strange, Invisible Sun, or whatever he produces that is urban fantasy-adjacent?

what real gamer can afford his games?

 

[Fenris-77]

Invisible Sun is awesome. It's also enormous. You also might need a mortgage to buy it. I've also never run it. So there's that.

 

[Imaculata]

I've been brainstorming a Ghostbusters campaign using D20 Modern rules, for the last few days. I'm mostly thinking about how it would work rulewise.

The questions I currently have are:

Tech trees. How to allow the players to develop new ghostbusting tech between jobs.

Ghost wrangling. The actual combat with ghosts, which should end with the ghost getting sucked into a trap.

Ghost abilities. How to keep combat varied and exciting.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

I assume that a genre-specific toolbox would not suffer from the same issues.

I feel like this is a mistaken assumption because the Urban Fantasy genre is so extremely broad. And it's been attempted - Unisystem was basically the "Urban Fantasy genre-specific RPG" back in the 1990s.

Just in this thread, we're talking about everything from Shadowrun, to Dresden, to City of Mists, to Urban Shadows, to World of Darkness and stranger games too.

There's no system that could accomodate all those games and their associated worlds/settings/magic/etc. comfortably without it being broadly generic and having the exact issue @Umbran described.

AFMBE is a poor example for two reasons:

1) It is a generic RPG, just with specific rules in a single book - specifically, it's Unisystem. Which I've already mentioned was basically a generic RPG focused on Urban Fantasy-type stuff. It's not an zombie-specific RPG. It's just a subset of the Unisystem rules for running zombie-oriented games.

2) AFMBE is pretty generic-feeling and whilst the advice about designing zombie settings and campaigns is good, it could be applied to any number of RPGs, and AFMBE/Unisystem is not, in fact, a great system for running zombie campaigns, I would argue (admittedly based only on having played it a little - but I was a huge fan of zombies back then).

So if we went with AFMBE as the example of way to do this, all you would do is take, say, Cortex Prime, or Cypher, or Fate, or whatever, just like they did with Unisystem, and then just build out an absolute ton of examples using that generic system. That gives you a toolbox. But the more flexible it is, the less flavour and distinctiveness it is likely to have.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

I've been brainstorming a Ghostbusters campaign using D20 Modern rules, for the last few days. I'm mostly thinking about how it would work rulewise.

The questions I currently have are:

Tech trees. How to allow the players to develop new ghostbusting tech between jobs.

Ghost wrangling. The actual combat with ghosts, which should end with the ghost getting sucked into a trap.

Ghost abilities. How to keep combat varied and exciting.

The movies didn’t really have much in the way of real combat. Most of the ghosts either avoided the streams or got captured when hit by one. Only boss critters seemed to be resistant. So from most of the ghosts point of view, the streams were an insta-lose.

But the streams were inaccurate AND hard to control. And the traps had a limited capacity. Perhaps adding a lack of dependability- malfunctions and breakdowns- could reduce the sameyness.

More stream-resistant spectres would also spice things up...as long as they weren’t all resistant the same way. Perhaps lift a page from Dark Sun, and make the more powerful undead a little more unique.

 

[Imaculata]

Yeah, the way it works in the Ghostbusters RPG, ghosts basically have an ectoplasmic presence that is reduced by zapping it.... so basically just hitpoints. Once reduced to 0, the ghost is rendered helpless and can be wrangled into a trap. But I feel there is more you could do with this. The wrangling itself could require some effort, as the Ghost struggles to get free. I could see this working as a basic grapple check, where other party members can assist to help keep the ghost grappled. But maybe there should also be a way for a ghost to break free and regain some of their lost hitpoints.

Possibly, (and I'm just brainstorming here) if a ghost managed to make his opposing grapple check, he automatically regains one die of his maximum hitpoints. For example, a ghost that has 16 hp (4d6), regains up to 6 hp after breaking a hold. The Ghostbusters then have to reduce his hp back to 0, to attempt another grapple. Every round that the ghost is not being attacked, it also regains 1 hp. This adds a bit of a complication to the busting, where you can't just exit combat without undoing all your hard work.

In order for a ghost to have more than one attempt at escaping a grapple, it should take time to pull a ghost towards the trap (depending on how close it is to the ghost of course). Also, other ghosts that are not yet wrangled, can continue to attack the Ghostbusters to help break their hold on their ghost buddy. Perhaps a Ghostbuster that takes damage while wrangling a ghost, needs to succeed at a concentration check to keep the ghost wrangled? Or perhaps the wrangled ghost gets a bonus attempt to break the grapple, with a bonus?