# Urban Shadows *Created:* 2025-08-06, *Modified:* 2026-10-09 ![[Urban Shadows (cover).jpg|600]] **Urban Shadows** is a **[[Powered by the Apocalypse|PbtA]]** game for those who looked at classic monster stories and thought, "This is great, but it needs more backstabbing, social maneuvering, and crushing debt." It's less about being badass enough to *kill* the werewolf president and more about figuring out who the werewolf president owes a favor to — and how to leverage it. You play vampires, wizards, fae, and a few poor mortals who know too much, all scrambling for a piece of the city. Forget grand quests; this is about survival, power, and the messy, beautiful chaos of a city that never sleeps and is always hungry. ## Setting The game drops the classic **Urban Shadows** premise onto the table: a modern city teeming with the supernatural, where **vampires, werewolves, wizards, fae, and mortals** all vie for control. Politics, not combat, is the real battlefield — who owes whom, what favors can be called in, and who runs which corner of the city tonight. The city itself is a character, built up through factions, neighborhoods, and the tangled web of debts and relationships between the power players. The **MC** frames the fiction and plays to find out who ends up on top by morning. ## Mechanics The core is the standard **Powered by the Apocalypse** move: when your character does something interesting and uncertain, you roll **2d6 + a stat** (like Blood, Heart, Mind, or Spirit) and read the ladder — **10+** full success, **7–9** partial with a cost or hard choice, **6−** a miss that lets the MC make a move and ratchet up the danger. What makes **Urban Shadows** distinctive is its **political machinery**: **Debts** — "I owe you one" — are a core currency you spend and collect across the table, and the city runs on **Circles and Status** that track where each character stands in the supernatural power structure. Both editions lean on this, but they tune it differently. The **first edition** had an open-ended **"let it out"** move for channeling supernatural power and a "unleash an attack" combat move where rolling 7–9 forced a choice of what you lose. The **second edition** sharpens these: **"turn to violence"** always inflicts harm on a hit but lets your opponent pick your consequence; "let it out" becomes **playbook-specific sets of four abilities**; rigid factions become **Circles** (Mortalis, Night, Power, Wild); and a **faction turn** — a downtime phase where players and MC both jockey the city's political board — plus **City Hubs** keep the focus on relationships and obligations rather than pure combat. ## Editions - **Urban Shadows** (1st edition, 2015) — Magpie Games. *The earlier edition is superseded in the library.* - **Urban Shadows: Second Edition** (2024) — Magpie Games. *In the library* (core + playbooks + play sheets). ## References - [Buy Urban Shadows 2nd Edition — Magpie Games](https://magpiegames.com/collections/urban-shadows) - [Buy Urban Shadows 2nd Edition PDF — DriveThruRPG](https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/495581/urban-shadows-2nd-edition) - [Interview with Mark Diaz Truman on 2e — EN World](https://www.enworld.org/threads/urban-shadows-2e-an-interview-with-mark-diaz-truman-magpie-games.676259/) - [Discussion of 1e vs 2e mechanics — RPG Stack Exchange](https://rpg.stackexchange.com/questions/194997/how-does-urban-shadows-second-edition-differ-from-the-original)