Penny

Dark Streets - Urban Shadows

Corvus Bay

+ City of Crows
+ Multicultural
+ Bounty of Neptune
+ Nature's Sanctuary
+ The Resting Dead
+ Place of the Arts

Corvus bay is on the eastern coast of the United States. It was named by early explorers for the flocks of crows which could be seen rising from the shoreline as they approached. Native American lore also mentions a place of crows, though the associations are vague and contradictory. While an old city, Corvus Bay remains vital due to a thriving port.

Dramatis Persona

City Moves

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Appeal to Old King Crow
Make an offering to the crows. It must be shiny and or delicious. The offering must take place somewhere high and be marked with blood or tears. Roll with your lowest faction.

On a miss, the crows are offended and the city will take vengance in a sudden and savage fashion.

On a 6-9 the crows look favorabley upon you though they demand a price, pick two:

▢ Learn something of value from the crows.
▢ Find something lost and powerful.
▢ The price the crows demand seems paltry and arbitrary.

On a 10-12:

Add the following option to the list

▢ Gain the lasting favor of the crows. They will perform small tasks at your command for the remainder of the session. After the first task each request incurs a debt to Old King Crow.
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Dark Streets - Urban Shadows

Dark Streets

The city is all around you, a hungry, embracing darkness, it is an insatiable machine that draws in lives and grinds them to ruin. We dress it up with parks, with developments, with fucking shopping malls, but that doesn't change what it is. Beneath the glitz and glamor, behind the broad defensive walls of the suburbs, beneath the feeble glare of streetlights, the city is a relentless monstrous beast, gorging itself on a cornucopia of flesh and corruption. And that is just the humans.

Beneath the streets dark forces are at play. Coven's of vampires move through the night, stalking their next victims. Strange fae courts dance to music no mortal can hear, granting gifts to humans that twist in their hands to destroy their very souls. Dark things from the infernal realm ride behind the eyes of inconspicuous business men and leering insane wizards plunge daggers into the hearts of their sacrificial victims. Worse yet these forces move against each other, grinding mortal and magical alike between their titanic metaphysical mass.

A storm is coming.

If you want to survive the storm, you had best get busy...

______________________________________________________________

Welcome to my very ill advised attempt to run an Urban Shadows game.

I'm planning to accept no more than 4 players.

Rules PDF

i.4pcdn.org/tg/1445670817768.pdf

Urban Shadows - Tales from Corvus Bay

@Nivi I am still accepting :)

Urban Shadows - Tales from Corvus Bay

To play my Oracle Kendra again, or to make a new character; that is the question.

@XxFellsingxX

Either choice will be welcome!

Urban Shadows - Heebie Jeebies

*poach*

roleplayerguild.com/topics/190617-urb…

Fortune & Glory: Grimdark Pulp RP

Jocasta dearly wished she hadn't drunk so much the previous night. The wine, which had been so fruity and delicious the night before, was a poor travelling companion as they set off on the East Road through the chill of a rainy morning. The Dwarves were in somewhat better spirits, being both more resilient to the effects of drinking and completely elated at the notion of marching off to adventure despite the rain. They were a strange people, by turns taciturn and exuberant with little apparent logic for the changes. Certainly they had seemed impressed that Beren had been able to secure the writs they needed so quickly, and despite their outward show of fatalism about the whole quest, Jocasta could tell they were excited.

Much of what had transpired the previous evening still troubled her. What had been Giroux's game? Why had the demon had her engineer Beren's encounter with her? Did it intend for events to transpire this way? and if so to what end? The line of enquiry curled back in on itself, accomplishing nothing other than to worsen her dull headache. Jocasta wore a traveling cloak and a wide brimmed sun hat that kept the worst of the rain off her. She whispered a simple spell that repelled the water, making her shimmer slightly in the gray morning light. As she worked the magic she felt a slight reverberation in the dragonfly ear rings that Beren had given her. She frowned slightly but she felt too miserable to investigate at the moment.

"Here eat this," Beren said, pulling his horse beside her and passing her a warm flat bread. Jocasta prodded at it unenthusiastically. It was heavy and dense.

"Dwarven trail bread," he explained, "flour, powdered mushroom and bacon fat with salt and herbs. Then its pressed dry and baked." If Beren had been a bread salesmen the pitch would have seen him starving before too long but Jocasta had to admit that it smelled good. She bit off a corner of it and found to be surprisingly tasty.

"Aye it's good for hangovers too," one of the dwarves snickered. Jocasta munched on the bread, feeling the improvement of having something on her stomach.

"How far is this Moreloke Estate?" she asked, having forgotten the minutiae of the discussion late last night.

"Three days if we push," Beren supplied. He paused and looked around. They were only a mile out of the city but the forest was already crowding the road. They had an unwholesome element to them, many of them crusted with moss and lichen above the snow line.

Damned to the Depths

The crowd recoiled from Markus' blade like a sucking tide. Several glasses dropped and shattered and at least one woman fainted dead away. Calliope wove her fingers in a complicated pattern in front of her face and the iron window awning began to twist and groan, growing over the windows and sprouting thorns of bright sharp iron that barred any escape. One man ran at the closing aperture and tried to dive through. One of the metal vines snapped down and wrapped around his leg. The man screamed as several other vines joined it, ripping and tearing the victim in a shower of blood and gristle. The wet ruin dropped outside the window and the vines resumed their places, gleaming with bright blood. Several people vomited but the net affect was a contraction towards the center of the room, the aristocrats piling up in a terrified knot at the center of the ball room, each trying to stay as far away from the windows and their deadly guardians as they could.

"Was that really necessary?" Markus asked in a low whisper. Calliope shrugged her shoulders.

"I'm not a damned gardener," she replied a touch pevishly, the spell having put considerable strain on her, even more so now the vines had tasted blood. They rattled and hissed against the windows but she kept them in place with force of will.

"You'll never get away with this!" a puddy man in puce livery blustered.

"You might be right, if the Governer decided to set fire to the building he could kill the lot of us in one go," Calliope admitted. She cocked her head as though considering.

"Of course, that would mean cooking the lot of you like so many roast chickens too."

Urban Shadows - Tales from Corvus Bay

Dark Streets

The city is all around you, a hungry, embracing darkness, it is an insatiable machine that draws in lives and grinds them to ruin. We dress it up with parks, with developments, with fucking shopping malls, but that doesn't change what it is. Beneath the glitz and glamor, behind the broad defensive walls of the suburbs, beneath the feeble glare of streetlights, the city is a relentless monstrous beast, gorging itself on a cornucopia of flesh and corruption. And that is just the humans.

Beneath the streets dark forces are at play. Coven's of vampires move through the night, stalking their next victims. Strange fae courts dance to music no mortal can hear, granting gifts to humans that twist in their hands to destroy their very souls. Dark things from the infernal realm ride behind the eyes of inconspicuous business men and leering insane wizards plunge daggers into the hearts of their sacrificial victims. Worse yet these forces move against each other, grinding mortal and magical alike between their titanic metaphysical mass.

A storm is coming.

If you want to survive the storm, you had best get busy...

______________________________________________________________

Welcome to my very ill advised attempt to run an Urban Shadows game.

I'm planning to accept no more than 4 players.

Rules PDF

i.4pcdn.org/tg/1445670817768.pdf

At The Edge of The World

"The Emperor?" Emmaline asked with a slightly puzzled frown. Despite Beren's best efforts and the limited protection of her broad brimmed hat she was getting a soaking. The Protosate was dripping, but he seemed indifferent to the trouble. Emmaline wondered how well the crossbow string would hold up in the wet, even sealed with wax there were limits.

"Empress Casavara retired to Contemplate the Mysteries in the Spring. Her nephew ,Haradatus the Second, is now on the throne. With new leadership come new priorities," their guide, whose name they still hadn't learned, replied easily. Contemplate the Mysteries might mean anything from a genuine retirement to scholarly life, to taking a knife to the kidneys at her nephew's order. Such was the way with Basilean's. Their might be half a dozen coups and counter coups before they settled on a final sovereign, whose early elimination of rivals made for a long reign after the initial blood letting. If this Haradatus was already sending out colonies, he must be confident indeed, or else these troops were too undependable to be anywhere close to the Imperial City.

"Well Long and Strong to him," Emmaline replied, using a Basilean colloquialism to invoke good luck on the Emperors reign. It had a few different meanings depending on how it was used but it made their guide smile. They crossed a second ditch and entered the camp proper. As expected tents and more permanent structures were laid out on grids. Stumps of trees scattered around the stony expanse of ground, their trunks pilled up and stripped of branches at a makeshift lumber mill towards the rear of the camp. The center was an old stone structure that clearly predated the colonists, probably it had been little more than a tumble down pile of moss covered stones when they arrived, but the industrious Legionaries had already restored it as best they could, replacing fallen stonework with timber and an impressive roof of split shingle.

"Welcome to Fort Serpentus," the guide declared grandly.

Pax Astra

Sabatine swirled her own beer and took another pull. It was a potent brew, though she knew Tiber ruminations had more to do with the fact that he had seen a workshop he had sunk months into trashed. She thought of her fruit trees and her dam and washed the sour taste out of her mouth with the malty brew.

"I'm from Caledon," she said after a minute. "My ancestors came out from Rome three generations back and we have been their ever since." Caledon was a prosperous, if low tech world on the edge of settled space. Roman civilization coexisted uneasily with a barbarian people of earlier waves of settlement, known as the Pact, and with pirates and cut throats who made the sector their base for constant raiding. Sabatine had cut her teeth dropping assault teams onto pirate held worlds or asteroids.

"When Mercedes convinced old Grundark to march on Earth, we all pulled up stumps and went, three entire legions. Pact must have swarmed all over the place soon as we left. Three generations of work gone," she mused sourly, gazing out at her orchards. She wondered if the same thing were about to happen here in microcosm. Not for the first time she wondered if she should have just bowed her neck and paid, but that was foolish. Ketcharch Grom had systematically ground the people of the province into poverty, save for a few favorites who competed for his table scraps.

"Maybe I'm just fighting because that is what I know," she continued, finishing the bottle in a long pull. "Which I suppose is as good a reason as any." She tossed the bottle overhand so that it bounced off a plastic partition and into a bin for washing and later reuse.

"You should rack out, I'll take first watch."

____________________

Morning came bright and early. Sabatine rose before dawn and went through her usual routine of watering plants, washing and packing Opal fruit and carefully adding lime to the soil to keep the alkalinity in balance. After a breakfast of nut bread and opal fruit preserve along with coffee imported from one of the Earth-likes at considerable expense, they lifted the assault boat and brought it down in the woods to the rear of the property, covering it as best the could with an old roll of cam film that was still in one of the storage lockers. The martime smell had faded significantly, but had been replaced with the tang of bleach to an unpleasant extent. The air filters badly needed replacement and Sabatine didn't dare run them out for the sake of getting rid of a bad smell and a slight stinging in the eyes. That task completed they hiked along the river to the damn, then up to the house.

"This isn't exactly subtle," Tiber said as they climbed onto the atv that had belonged to the now deceased goons. Tiber who, evidently, had experience driving such vehicles sat in the front while Sabatine sat behind him, obliged to grip his waist to avoid falling off as they bumped down the rough track she had cut to the local road. A couple of piles of gravel, taller than two men sat by the road, waiting to be spread across the dirt path as the first step to making it a bit more traversable.

"I doubt we are going to do too much that is subtle today," Sabatine called over the wine of the electric engine as they joined the main road. This was a true Roman road, set into the ground and sealed with plasticizer. Despite being over sixty years old, the light traffic meant it looked almost new after the recent reigns.