Humble1

The Black of Night - Urban Shadows

So what does everyone think of having the city this game takes place in named Corvus Bay?

@rush99999

That works. We could have a crow theme.

The Black of Night - Urban Shadows

@tokkiya

Agreed, the top one is actually easier on the eye.

The Black of Night - Urban Shadows

Aliyah Schilling

Name: Aliyah Schilling Playbook: Wizard Age: 33 Look: African American Woman in Fancy Clothing Demeanor: Volatile Stats ---- Blood: -1 Heart: 0 Mind: 2 Spirit: 1 Factions ---- Mortality: 1 Night: -1 Power: 1 Wild: 1

Intro
Who are you?

Aliyah Schilling. Doctor Schilling, if you prefer.

How long have you been in the city?

All my life. How long has the city been in me? The same.

What keeps you up at night?

Very little, thanks to a sip of Ease of Mind. That's a tea from an herb in the Asteraceae family - that's the daisy family, for the record. Plus some other odds and ends. And the shot of whiskey doesn't hurt either. But if you mean what makes me resort to Ease of Mind ... my family, I suppose. My community. Same thing, in the end. I have responsibilities that weigh on my mind some nights. People place more faith in me than I deserve, and make more demands than I can handle, which is the fate of every competent woman.

What have you sacrificed for your power?

I have no power. Only knowledge. And I earned it - EARNED it, mind - the old fashioned way. I worked, studied, practiced. Oh, I'll grant you, coming from my family I had a leg up. But every step I took was my own. If I'm still single in my thirties - a fact that I assure you my mother and several aunts point out every day - and if I have few friends, and few hobbies, what of it?

What do you desperately need?

What does everyone need? Time. More money would be nice, I suppose, but it always seems to come with strings attached. But I have sachets to make up, and blessing to perform, and teas to brew and wounds to heal and minds to mend and more every day. Just give me time, and a nap.

Gear: A simple house with an herb garden and a sunroom. An old truck with the back full of flowerpots and soil. Cell phone.
Focus: Herbs, potions, powders and poultices.
Sanctum: Kitchen at home.
Weapon: Butcher Knife (3-harm hand messy)

Features:
An extremely knowledgeable assistant - Imani, a russet cat who sniffs every potion and always knows where every ingredient is.
A library of old tomes
Magical booby traps - Goofer dust around the foundation. Keeps away pest and other undesirables.
An apothecary

Flaws:
It contains many volatile substances
Its location is known by many

FOCUS
A satchel full of powders and concoctions.

SPELLS
Tracking
Memory Wipe
Hex

Debts

Someone is helping you keep your demons at bay. You owe them a Debt.

Sometimes coming from a magical family is a pain in the posterior. Sometimes it means you have to deal with intrusive relatives and their scrying spells, sometimes you have to deal with demons. Well, not literal hellish demons, although if you squint it's hard to tell.

Someone in my family - don't ask me who but not me - made a deal with Queen Mab herself from the Unseelie Court. I'm guessing whoever it was is long dead now, but the Unseelie don't have a tight grasp of human time. One of the courtiers decided it was time to collect and sent around their collections crew. Those are the guys who could pass for demons in any evangelist's nightmares. And apparently, the debt is one whole person. And I'm the lucky person.

Thank the Goddess that Caber stepped in. Between the two of us, we managed to get the Unseelie so turned around that they might as well have been back in the Underhill. So far, we've been able to keep them from tracking me down.

I hear that I'm obliged to marry someone in the Unseelie Court. My romantic prospects are pretty dismal, but I'm not that desperate.

Someone is your go-to when you get into trouble. You owe them 2 Debts.

Who else? My sister. Doctor Theresa Schilling. The white sheep of the family. The Schillings have practiced hoodoo since the days of slavery. So what does my rebellious older sister do? She runs off and becomes a skeptic, that's what. Oh, she's willing to admit that herbal remedies might work, but don't get her started on hexes and hands and juju.

Still, she's my sister. I can call her whenever there's a problem. And there's always a problem. Last month there was a local church where the preacher got it into his head to sermonize against traditional medicine as "witchcraft." OK, fine, but he started naming names, and wouldn't you know it but Schilling was one of those names. So my sister comes to town with her organization - Society for the Examination of the Supernatural, or something like that - and does an expose on some of the miracle claims that the preacher had made. Lo and behold, it also turned out that preacher man had been doing some "laying on of hands" with a couple of women in the congregation. When Theresa got that story out, the whole church shook.

So, she's effective, and she's smart, she's my sister, and I owe her. I just have to be careful not to let her meet any of my more exotic customers. That could get ugly fast.

You are helping someone keep a dangerous secret. They owe you a Debt.

There are only a few people in the world who know how to properly brew garum, the ancient Mediterranean condiment that the Romans put on everything. Great-grandma Moesy Schilling was one. Goddess only knows how she got the recipe. She passed the method down through the family.

So, one day I've got a barrel of garum brewing in my back garden. It involves fermenting fish juice, so it's a hard thing to miss from downwind. I turn around and there's this man standing there, trying to figure out where the smell is coming from. Imani - my cat - takes one look and nopes right out of there. Not even the frizzle chickens want to get close, and they love anything that smells like magic. So I chant a quick wisdom verse, and suddenly realize I've got an incredibly old vampire standing in my back garden looking wistful at a barrel of fish guts.

He introduces himself as January. Turns out he was an ancient Roman and hasn't smelled that ... distinctive fragrance in about 1700 years. We dicker a bit. I promise never to reveal his secret to any of the local churches - like any would listen to me - and he agrees not to try and drink from any of the Schillings. He also buys the entire batch of garum.

There are a few folks in the local magical community who would love some vampire fangs for elixirs. SO far, I've been able to keep them from finding out about January.

The Village At The End of the World (A Darkest Dungeon Inspired RP)

Interested.

The thing I remember most about Darkest Dungeon is how tense the combat is. It's a game where a few bad rolls can spell the end of a party no matter how careful the player. But this is in Casual rather than Dice. How are you planning to deal with the combat?

Urban Shadows

I can't seem to find any rules in the book regarding vampires and sunlight.

@rush99999

There aren't any.

Urban fantasy is all over the map in regards to the strengths and weaknesses of vampires, werewolves, etc. Rather than create a system for it all, Urban Shadows leaves it up to the player.

We’ve done our best to include in the moves and Archetypes everything we
think is necessary to make Urban Shadows work at your table. Part of our
design philosophy, however, is to leave holes all over the map for your group
to fill in. We want you to make the city come to life, to be the kind of vampire
or werewolf or wizard or faerie that you want to be, and to tell us what you
know about the world. We trust that your answers to those questions will be
far more interesting than anything we could set down as hard and fast truth.

Urban Shadows

How do we want to handle debts? Do we distribute them among the three PCs, or do we create NPCs?

Deadlands: Tales o' the Weird West

John William Henry

You mark my fuckin' words, before this day is out, we're going to see people wanderin' into Deadwood that we've never seen before, who have no idea that the rock is even here.

The steam carriage hissed and rattled to a stop at the corner of Lee and Main. The oak door shuddered twice before finally swinging open. One battered workboot hit the ground, raising puff of dust.

The man who stepped out could fool the eye into thinking that he was as wide as he was tall. Broad black shoulders had to turn sideways slightly to get out of the narrow carriage door. Under one arm was a soldier's haversack, stuffed to overflowing with worldly goods. The other arm carried a squirming load of dog, a barrel-chested pit breed sniffing the wind and shaking pricked ears.

"Well, Polly, we're here. Now it's time to figure out where 'here' is."

Post office and hotel offered little to a man like John Henry. The theater ... would he even be allowed inside? But a hardware store ... that held promise.

"C'mon, girl. Let's go get the lay of the land."

The front door to the Star & Bullock Hardware Store did not have a bit of stick to it, and the wide-board floors did not squeak under foot. Henry nodded firmly to himself. The set of a man's face might lie, but the product of their hands told you their true character. Someone cared about craftsmanship in this building.

A chill went down his back when he saw the ghost rock equipment lining the shelves. Slowly and reluctantly he forced himself to examine the new contraptions. One - a ghost rock powered drill - had an almost repulsive effect on him. Fighting himself, he made his hands lift the heavy machine and turn it over, memorizing every detail.

He'd left almost everything behind in Mississippi, but it looked like some horrors had preceded him. There wasn't much farther he could run. Best to make what he could out of this place, carve something out of this ... Deadwood.

Urban Shadows

Aliyah Schilling submission

Name: Aliyah Schilling Age: 33 Look: African American Woman in Fancy Clothing Demeanor: Volatile Stats ---- Blood: -1 Heart: 0 Mind: 2 Spirit: 1 Factions ---- Mortality: 1 Night: -1 Power: 1 Wild: 1

Intro
Who are you?

Aliyah Schilling. Doctor Schilling, if you prefer.

How long have you been in the city?

All my life. How long has the city been in me? The same.

What keeps you up at night?

Very little, thanks to a sip of Ease of Mind. That's a tea from an herb in the Asteraceae family - that's the daisy family, for the record. Plus some other odds and ends. And the shot of whiskey doesn't hurt either. But if you mean what makes me resort to Ease of Mind ... my family, I suppose. My community. Same thing, in the end. I have responsibilities that weigh on my mind some nights. People place more faith in me than I deserve, and make more demands than I can handle, which is the fate of every competent woman.

What have you sacrificed for your power?

I have no power. Only knowledge. And I earned it - EARNED it, mind - the old fashioned way. I worked, studied, practiced. Oh, I'll grant you, coming from my family I had a leg up. But every step I took was my own. If I'm still single in my thirties - a fact that I assure you my mother and several aunts point out every day - and if I have few friends, and few hobbies, what of it?

What do you desperately need?

What does everyone need? Time. More money would be nice, I suppose, but it always seems to come with strings attached. But I have sachets to make up, and blessing to perform, and teas to brew and wounds to heal and minds to mend and more every day. Just give me time, and a nap.

Gear: A simple house with an herb garden and a sunroom. An old truck with the back full of flowerpots and soil. Cell phone.
Focus: Herbs, potions, powders and poultices.
Sanctum: Kitchen at home.
Weapon: Butcher Knife (3-harm hand messy)

Features:
An extremely knowledgeable assistant - Imani, a russet cat who sniffs every potion and always knows where every ingredient is.
A library of old tomes
Magical booby traps - Goofer dust around the foundation. Keeps away pest and other undesirables.
An apothecary

Flaws:
It contains many volatile substances
Its location is known by many

FOCUS
A satchel full of powders and concoctions.

SPELLS
Tracking
Memory Wipe
Hex

Urban Shadows

You're a wizard Humble!

@Penny

Prolly a witch, but we'll see how things shake out.

Urban Shadows

If that's where we're at, I'm leaning towards Wizard. If someone has their heart set, I'll go with Aware.