Urban Arcana, thoughts?

[Blackhawk748]

Im kicking around running an Urban Arcana game for my players and im curious on everyone's thoughts on it.

[T.G. Oskar]

It's a pretty good way to hold people that like D&D into a game using the d20 Modern rules. That's mostly what an Urban Arcana campaign is: D&D in the contemporary age.

Because of its thematic similarity with the Shadow Chasers campaign (creatures of Shadow exist; you fight them in Chasers, you deal with them in UA), it's not so hard to make them overlap. The focus is what matters: if the focus is on hunting creatures of Shadow, then a Shadow Chasers campaign is better; if the idea is to basically have urban adventures with spell and firearm, then UA is the better campaign.

Do note that, without magical support by mid-levels, the creatures you face can be pretty powerful. While dragons in D&D can range from challenges to pushovers, in d20 Modern they rarely go below challenges, and can easily be TPKs. That is because most creatures are translated almost verbatim from the Monster Manual, while d20 Modern characters tend to be a bit less focused than their D&D counterparts.

Department 7 works somewhat the same in a Chasers or UA campaign; they deal with creatures of Shadow, in both ways (killing them and working with them). In Chasers, though, it's most likely anthropocentric, whereas on UA it's more tolerant of creatures of Shadow.

As for playable races, remember that they're immigrants who lost their memories and only barely know they're not locals. They don't remember anything about their past lives, and people see them as strange humans, so it's natural to think of them as you would...well, stereotypes. Dwarves would be hard workers, Elves could be superstars or models, whereas Orcs and Bugbears are tough muscle and often end up on the wrong side of the law. As with D&D, tho, the key is that the PCs are unique; therefore, while they should think of what their lives are on Earth, they don't need to follow their stereotypes. Of course, cater to their advantages: an Elf could be raised in Italy, know Italian as well as Elven and be part of the carabinieri (think Special Forces), and it'd make perfect sense in a UA campaign (not to mention using their better Dex score for good measure).

So, in short: think of D&D mingled with the modern world, and you get how to play UA. If you're coming purely from a d20 Modern perspective, just remember that it's a more "inclusive" form of Shadow Chasers, where you're not monster hunters but rather sort of the world's MIB.

[thorr-kan]

The Dark*Matter sourcebook could also serve as good material. Dark matter and the shadow have a lot of thematic similarities.