Small Town Monsters in the Big City

An Urban Shadows character generation procedure by Lauren McManamon, Keeper of the Secrets of Quachil Uttaus (@thestraykiwi) and Kyle Thompson, Keeper of the Light of the Peerless Star (@wiegraf_)

In some parts of the Powered by the Apocalypse (PbtA) community it's a popular practice to import characters from a finished Monsterhearts campaign into a new game of Urban Shadows, giving them a new context and new story to tell on top of what the first campaign already established. It's easy to go overboard with character backstory in a new campaign, adding nothing but cruft and taking away from the stories that can be built around other PCs, but in a campaign with only one PC from a small town background, this kind of character development can be a great help to the MC.

Not everyone has a spare Monsterhearts character lying around to import into Urban Shadows, but the key plot beats of a Monsterhearts game are a great way to establish external and internal character conflict. These extra establishing questions will let you hit those plot beats and feel like your character has gone through their own monstrous high school experience.

The MC chooses 4 at character generation before asking the standard US establishing questions:

• Where did you come from? What was your high school like?
• Who did you end up in detention with? Did you deserve it? What did you learn about the other detainees? Whose company do you still cherish from that time?
• Who did you reveal your monstrous nature to and how did they use that against you?
• What did your parents do that you can never forgive? Did you manage to leave them behind?
• How did you lose your innocence and what have you promised to never do again?
• How did you decide to move to the city? Who did you betray to get there?