Urban Shadows is a game I’d heard of, but never played, and was down in the unfashionable “these will never come up” tail end of my event wishlist.

Well, it did, and after some misgivings during the game, I’m glad it did.

Urban Shadows is political urban fantasy, so there’s a lot going on with debts owed & owing, the power+influence of your circle/group, that sort of thing.

In a slightly comedic move I decided that he’s the night auditor at a hotel, and that he acts and dresses accordingly. In hindsight this may have been influenced at least a little by the hotel manager character from the John Wick films, but I wasn’t thinking that at the time.

For about half the game I’d been thinking that I just wasn’t quite getting this game, with a side note of the thought that I’d chosen a character who just couldn’t do anything. I was vaguely contemplating for the option of returning my ticket for the Urban Shadows game I had the next day and looking for something else to play, but then somehow it clicked and I figured out what this particular character was about, at which point the game became a chunk more fun and interesting.

I did have the moment, at the end of the game when there was a huge fight going on with various supernatural critters involved, where I was wondering how on Earth I could get involved without getting instantly squished. I didn’t have as much that I could do in that situation as the Wizard or the Werewolf or the Demon or the Fae, but I still got to contribute, mostly in the category of “bad guy tries to escape”/”oh no you bloody don’t”.

In an amusing thematic moment, the survivors of an attempt to gather vast magical powers, having made it through attacks by all sorts of magical critters, were finished off by a couple of pistol shots from an annoyed man in khakis & a business shirt+tie.

It would be fair to say that that game grew on me. I did look to see whether there was anything in the same time slot as my next Urban Shadows game, just in case I wanted to swap, but there was nothing that appealed more than the game I already had.

Second Rapscallion game of the con, and it was just as much fun as the first one. I leaned into the cursed aspect of the character, which was fun, and basically avoided the safe options in favour of the interesting ones.

In a longer game this character is probably in deep trouble, since I’m pretty sure he broke the strictures of his curse at one point, but we all around the table forgot about it. If he did, it was the perfect moment for it; In disguise, infiltrating the base of the crew he formerly ran with, and in a conversation with his former Captain.