Urban Fantasy general discussion thread

[Ulfgeir]

I mean, that kind of fits the theme, in a Call of Cthulhu "play to find out how you're going to lose" way.

There was an optional rule as far as I gathered that you could for some rolls at least, look at the size of your dice-pool, and then instead of rolling get a certain number of automatic successes. So that avoids some of those messes that the crits (both the good and the bad) cause. And if your humanity was too low (I think 7 or below), then you had problems appearing alive, even with the use "blush of life" (the use of which of course cost blood and risk raising your hunger even more)

 

[aramis erak]

There was an optional rule as far as I gathered that you could for some rolls at least, look at the size of your dice-pool, and then instead of rolling get a certain number of automatic successes. So that avoids some of those messes that the crits (both the good and the bad) cause. And if your humanity was too low (I think 7 or below), then you had problems appearing alive, even with the use "blush of life" (the use of which of course cost blood and risk raising your hunger even more)

1st version of VTM... the one with variable difficulty numbers... if you had a skill higher than the difficulty number, you could opt to not roll and take 1 success.
You could also spend willpower for an automatic success.

 

[Eyes of Nine]

Jumping in at the end (so far) of this thread.

Has Urban Shadows been mentioned yet?

These games have single settings with decades of awkward lore baked into their rules, as opposed to giving you the option to select any of many different "Night Worlds" using the same basic system like what Night Shift does. This feels very restrictive to me. What if I don't like their arbitrarily limited selection?

I'm not sure what the issue is?

If it touts itself as "Urban Fantasy", then it's going to have some setting stuff baked in, like Vamps, Lycans, Fae, and a bunch of other stuff. Right?

Otherwise, you'll have to spend a lot of time building stuff up in a generic system.

I'm not familiar with Night Shift.

btw, how do folks actually define "Urban Fantasy"?

 

[aramis erak]

btw, how do folks actually define "Urban Fantasy"?

My working definition, may not match others...
Any 19th to 21st century setting where groups of supernatual beings are hiding amongst us in society engaged in their own supernatural agendas.

This includes Percy Jackson, Dresden Files, BTVS/Angel, Blade, Twilight, Forever Knight, maybe even X-Files... and Sabrina the Teenage Witch, I Dream of Genie, and Bewitched. My favorite is about an Elf princess in a trailer park in the American South. I'd put Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Slayer as just outside the urban fantasy genre, but very closely related, in the same way as Vampire: Dark Age.
I don't count any zombies game/motion-picture/literature as urban fantasy.

I'll note that Unisystem Lite is actually not a bad fit for Buffy and Angel; I'm not so sure it is for Army of Darkness, but AoD isn't what I'd call urban fantasy. Unlike the full Unisystem, the streamlining includes all rolls being made by players, no damage rolls, and multiple power levels of PCs in the same party to match the fiction. It's prep-heavy, but it plays very well, with the supernatural abilities tailored to the various settings.

 

[Eyes of Nine]

My working definition, may not match others...
Any 19th to 21st century setting where groups of supernatual beings are hiding amongst us in society engaged in their own supernatural agendas.

This includes Percy Jackson, Dresden Files, BTVS/Angel, Blade, Twilight, Forever Knight, maybe even X-Files... and Sabrina the Teenage Witch, I Dream of Genie, and Bewitched. My favorite is about an Elf princess in a trailer park in the American South. I'd put Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Slayer as just outside the urban fantasy genre, but very closely related, in the same way as Vampire: Dark Age.
I don't count any zombies game/motion-picture/literature as urban fantasy.

I'll note that Unisystem Lite is actually not a bad fit for Buffy and Angel; I'm not so sure it is for Army of Darkness, but AoD isn't what I'd call urban fantasy. Unlike the full Unisystem, the streamlining includes all rolls being made by players, no damage rolls, and multiple power levels of PCs in the same party to match the fiction. It's prep-heavy, but it plays very well, with the supernatural abilities tailored to the various settings.

I like your definition but... Harry Potter?

And X-Files is a bender, because it also includes aliens. But I guess you can have Aliens in your Urban Fantasy...?

And I wonder, how Urban does the Urban Fantasy have to be. I'm thinking of Patricia Briggs Mercedes Thompson series that takes place in a small town in eastern Washington...

 

[Umbran]

My working definition, may not match others...
Any 19th to 21st century setting where groups of supernatual beings are hiding amongst us in society engaged in their own supernatural agendas.

Is "hiding among us" necessary, in your view, or merely common? So, something like True Blood (Charlaine Harris' "Southern Vampire Mysteries") in which the vampires come out of the closet - urban fantasy, or not?

 

[aramis erak]

Is "hiding among us" necessary, in your view, or merely common? So, something like True Blood (Charlaine Harris' "Southern Vampire Mysteries") in which the vampires come out of the closet - urban fantasy, or not?

Hiding? yes, definitional. it was part of the definition of the genre by one of the publishing houses.
And I don't consider Fantasy moderns nor Fantasy Cyberpunk (Shadowrun, Torg's Tharkold and Cyberpapacy) in the UF, either, because the public knowledge makes for different Dynamics with other mundane elements.

Not familiar with True Blood.

 

[aramis erak]

I like your definition but... Harry Potter?

And X-Files is a bender, because it also includes aliens. But I guess you can have Aliens in your Urban Fantasy...?

And I wonder, how Urban does the Urban Fantasy have to be. I'm thinking of Patricia Briggs Mercedes Thompson series that takes place in a small town in eastern Washington...

Modern, hidden second society, a conspiracy to keep the muggles in the dark. It's just that it's the subgenre where the hidden supernaturals are the protagonists. Just like in Angel.

X-Files bends & blends; I wasn't a fan, but watched a few.

The urban part? Yeah, I consider it weakly definitional. It needs to have enough population to hide in. Weaker than the hidden part. If the whole town is aware, and the game is set in the town, no, that's a related genre. If instead it's set in a neighboring town, and the critters are trying to move in.

For comparison, I do consider Stranger Things to be UF. No one believes the kids... unless the individuals are part of the conspiracy.
Tales from the Loop doesn't quite hit it, being (at least in the half-season I watched) closer to whatever the heck the genre of Twilight Zone, The Outer Limits, and Dimension 404 share... The game, however, can be, depending upon how it's run. (It's a case of the game being inspirational and the streaming show a different beast than the game on many levels.)

The one I want to run, however, is Feng Shui 2... Cyberapes, ancient socerers, transformed animals living as humans... and time travel. The moderns portions are UF; the past aren't exactly, and the future juncture is post-holocaust.

 

[Crusadius]

Looks like wikipedia has a definition of Urban Fantasy

Urban fantasy - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

… the narrative uses supernatural elements in a 19th-century to 21st-century (or equivalent) urban society

I think it matches what I thought of as being urban fantasy.

 

[VelvetViolet]

Jumping in at the end (so far) of this thread.

Has Urban Shadows been mentioned yet?



I'm not sure what the issue is?

If it touts itself as "Urban Fantasy", then it's going to have some setting stuff baked in, like Vamps, Lycans, Fae, and a bunch of other stuff. Right?

Otherwise, you'll have to spend a lot of time building stuff up in a generic system.

I'm not familiar with Night Shift.

btw, how do folks actually define "Urban Fantasy"?

I prefer having more settings overall and having more modular settings.

The community/market basically funnels you into World of Darkness, and I just don’t like those games. They have much more baked into them than just vampires, werewolves, and w/e. For example: all the vampires follow the same basic rules (undead, drink blood, burn in sunlight, highly flammable), vampires are descended from the biblical Cain (making the Abrahamic faiths demonstrably true), every vampire has “thinner blood” compared to their vampire parent (which only changes by fatally exsanguinating a vampire with “thicker blood”), the superpowers are arranged in an arbitrary hierarchical structure, etc. There’s a bazillion editions with different rules, assumptions, and lore retcons.

I didn’t want to deal with that nonsense, so I left that community a decade ago. I’ve never looked back and I’m glad for that.

Unfortunately, there aren’t many other options.