Last night, in Urban Shadows ...
We were playing in a Revolutionary France analog.
The PCs:
The Revolutionary: Tainted radical republican grad student, lead the attack on the Bastille and lead to National Assembly to take the King's palace.
The Prophet: Forsaw the King's guard was going to blow the Bastille, and turned it into a living hellscape.
The Foreigner: From Florence, which has had a constitution and no king for 140 years. Wound up stealing a 40 gun frigate and attacking the palace, ensuring the revolutionaries didn't all die.
The Voice: Disembodied ghost of the ancient royal house of the lost kingdom of Bath, claiming that the Revolutionary is the rightful king. Also protects and promotes the Revolutionary, including pushing the Greatest Mind of the revolution off a 4-story window to ensure the Revolutionary became the centerpiece.
The General: a sergeant from the last war, helping to train the revolution. He and six soldiers survived the Bastille, becoming the nation's great heroes.
This was nuts.
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Wow, Urban Shadows for la révolution? That's extra dark ... the game system rewards shifting alliances over the long term, so it would work real well for crafting your own Jacobin faction (and your own Reign of Terror).
ReplyDeleteWe very nearly beheaded a few nobles yesterday. I had to convince the Revolutionaries that we should keep our eye on the prize: the king.
ReplyDeleteThe nasty stuff comes out when you've run out of nobles, but people still want to see monsieur guillotine hard at work.
ReplyDeleteI thoroughly enjoyed working in details that the ghost was (1) at the battle of Roncevaux over 1000 years ago (2) Roland's lover (3) betrayed to Charlemagne by the General's ancestor.
ReplyDeleteMy one regret is that I did not know enough Orlando Furioso* to draw from, and had to settle for mixing lots of Song of Roland and actual history into my creativity.
Addendums: The General lost an arm (and more?) in the hellstille!
Marc's Oracle was named Elijah.
Corrections: The Foreigner was from "Zealand," some kind of Protestant, Germanic, low-country republic, not Florence.
Chuck and I were using the word "Basque" not "Bath".
I can't remember what Chuck called the not-Bastille.
*Tonight's research has revealed that Orlando Furioso is nuts and amazing and I should read it!! It includes such feature as: multiple cross-religious romances, at least one awesome lady knight, flying around on a hippogriff, and taking the prophet Elijah's (!) flaming chariot to the moon!!!
I will likely not draw on these events, but I will draw on names, characters, and themes from the poem.
Orlando Furioso is absolutely nuts and amazing, and you should read it. I should re-read it. It's been since college and I would likely pick up much more now.
ReplyDeleteBradamante is amazing, and will make you retroactively want to face-punch every RPG dude-bro who has ever told you "Hey, it's not our choice, that all the fighters are guys, that's just being true to the source fiction."
And the title character's madness is wonderfully evocative: He roams around the wilderness as a wild-eyed mad-man, unkempt, largely unclothed, just flat out finding errant knights and saying "You! I'm gonna kick you across the county, because I'm superhumanly powerful and CRAZY!" All his friends recognize quite clearly "Holy cow, Orlando has become one of the nutty monsters that we face on our quests, but he's still our friend, what the heck do we do?" So much more sophisticated than Mallory in many ways.