Over the weekend we played the second session of my new Urban Shadows game, which sees my online group cast as supernatural denizens of Pittsburgh, the city where a plurality of us met and went to college. While I pretty much never intend to inject thematic gravitas into my games, it’s very obvious that this one is about change. We can’t help but reflect on the city in terms of what’s changed and what’s the same compared to our college years, but Pittsburgh is also a cauldron of change, a boulder rolling downhill from the collapse of the steel industry to a rebirth based on healthcare and high-tech, all while the shape of this new city is still more informed by steel than by software. And then, because I can’t leave well enough alone, the game’s first arc is also about change, about a quiet detente between multiple supernatural factions being broken by some new arrivals.

Of course, the game is, to me at least, also about change on a meta-level, because going into this campaign my core question to myself was how do I run this better? I have not had many opportunities to return to games over the last several years, and generally when I have it would be to play a game I had previously GMed, or vice versa. With Urban Shadows, I ran a game with an in-person group that went through a chunk of 2025 and into early 2026 before falling apart. Some of it was group desires clashing with the particulars of the story and the system, but a good portion of it had to do with how I took what was given to me as a GM in Urban Shadows and used it.

Urban Shadows began development with a 2014 Kickstarter campaign which places it only a couple years out from Dungeon World and fairly early in PbtA’s lifecycle. I hesitate to try to align it with ‘generations’ of PbtA in part because those definitions are fairly porous but also in part due to the fact that Magpie Games was arguably the design house most responsible for pushing and advancing PbtA development. While Magpie has somewhat stepped back from the vanguard now compared to others like The Gauntlet and Evil Hat, Urban Shadows, Bluebeard’s Bride, and Masks are arguably some of the most important and influential PbtA games to ever be released. Anyway.

The point here is that Urban Shadows did not align to the early hybrid PbtA titles like Dungeon World and Monster of the Week which tried to recast characters into an adventuring party. No, more like the original Apocalypse World, Urban Shadows characters are very much their own thing and have their own motivations, with any cohesion left at the foot of the Debts which establish inter-character relationships and whatever the GM does to pull on those strings and bring the characters together. The issue here is that there are two basic ways to get all your Urban Shadows characters to come together and get pointed in the right direction. One, likely the platonic ideal of how the Debts mechanic is supposed to work, is to hit characters hard right at the beginning when those Debts are some of the only resources they have. In that way, characters are each others’ only help, and you push things deeper from the beginning. The second, or the one that is more reflective of how most groups actually work, is to create a big initial conflict that all the characters have their own reasons for caring about. Characters are still drawn to each other out of a broad lack of other ties into the world, but they aren’t dodging gunfire or trying to climb out of a hastily dug grave at session one.

One of my missteps the first time I ran Urban Shadows I didn’t really do either of these approaches all that well, which left some characters hanging in the wind a bit. As much as PbtA games do take from Apocalypse World in terms of how much you invite your players in to shape the world and provide their own buy-in, once the game starts you’re still a GM. You’re still ultimately setting up the situations by which the drama is created, and if you don’t provide the situations that bring characters together, they will necessarily drift apart. I don’t think I didn’t try to pull characters together in my first game, but with how many leads are generated in character creation, I didn’t pull hard enough compared to everything that was created and that all the players wanted to engage with.

So this time around, I created a much stronger overarching situation, one which the characters are now finding out about in the opening sessions of the game. It also strongly foreshadows how the game is going to go and what is changing. In retrospect, this is strongly reflective of the weakness inherent in treating any game like a sandbox; conflict is like potential energy, and always wants to roll downhill to its lowest-energy state. When you start a game, you need to establish what the conflict is. Alternatively, you can choose not to establish a conflict and instead run things more slice-of-life, though as I mentioned before a game like Urban Shadows needs something which pulls everyone together.

Urban Shadows, also, has faction mechanics, and incidentally I think the faction mechanics provide a small but brilliant procedure to help you as the GM keep track of what your conflict is. Every faction you write in Urban Shadows is going to have one of three statuses each faction turn: Maintaining, Striving, or Collapsing. Striving and Collapsing both mean that the faction makes a Move that turn, the difference is more why, and that a Collapsing faction has a clock on it before it, well, collapses. What’s interesting for considering conflict, especially at the beginning of a game, is considering what makes a move from Maintaining to Striving. When a faction is Maintaining, they don’t make a Faction Move, they’re just attending to their business. That means, at least as I’m considering it, for my game all factions start at Maintaining. It’s only after they get exposed to The Conflict™ that they may decide to do something about it and move to Striving. This makes my introductory string of sessions, well, kind of perfect. The PCs discover the inciting force that’s about to throw the city into chaos. They filter this information to the factions, either intentionally and deliberately or through the fallout of whatever actions they take. Then, the PCs and the existing factions must decide what to do. It also means that I get to spend 3ish sessions “setting up the pins” of this conflict and then, thanks to the faction turn and my players who will always choose chaos, I get 10x back out where we make everything crash to the ground.

I’m only two sessions into this game, but I already feel like I’ve done a better job at pointing all the characters at a core conflict. There are definitely some elements I need to pull on more (the Wizard’s ward especially hasn’t really come onscreen yet), but there’s still time, and everyone has at least some reason to be involved. It’s also a good test run for doing the compare/contrast work I need to refine my GMing within a system; I plan on running GURPS again soon and that system will drown you if you don’t have a solid set of best practices before the game starts. It’s a consideration I keep making as I look to the next few years of gaming; as much as I love seeing new games and scooping up new systems, there are so many games that I want to return to, to do better now that time has passed and I have more experience. With one possible exception, most of the top of my to-run list is made up of games I’ve run before, and that’s strangely exciting to me.