DM Notes: Lakeshore 21

Ahhh!

It's the end of Lakeshore! The spire has fallen, the signal is silenced, and it's time to sift through the pieces.

First of all, I'd like to say thank you to everyone who listened to Lakeshore. Romping around a wildly anachronistic, geographically-spurious Toronto has been a ton of fun, and we hope you've enjoyed the ride. As MC, I really tried to honour the principles of Urban Shadows and plan less, keep the story feral, and offer interesting choices to the players as often as I could. It took us in some exciting directions that I never would have guessed!

As for notes specific to this episode: in 21, we finally get a chance to talk with Mayor Graham! If there's one thing I wished happened differently, it's making better opportunities to make her presence felt earlier on. Urban Shadows is really interested in power structures and hierarchies, but that can also make key characters feel inaccessible. So the mayor has to bring a lot of presence and ideas in a short time in this episode, and I think it turns out reasonably well!

We also get to see inside Lennox Spire, to its glittering geode peak. I think it would be unwise, if not impossible, to do a story set in Toronto and not touch on the CN Tower (even if our version of it was erected several decades early), and as I sketched out the ideas I wanted to touch on in Lakeshore, I was often brought back to our 5e campaign Tallow.

Tallow, ultimately, asked questions about how people deal with history, and what happens when the powerless are ignored. The PCs, for the most part, lived comfortable lives, and only understood the way injustice was woven into their lives once they investigated the past for themselves to learn what would drive someone to destroy an important civic monument.

In Lakeshore, the players' roles are inverted. They feel disenfranchised by the powerful, and they work to destroy a monument that, in time, may have granted Mayor Graham a certain Eulachon-like following. Are their actions just? Maybe--one thing that makes Eulachon more sympathetic is the distance of history, and the measured benefit of the great candle, but we don't get to see exactly what Mayor Graham will do with her network. 

But certainly it is my hope that the two campaigns speak to each other and reflect and refract one another's ideas, and that the listener to hears both stories has the richer experience for it.

Really, I could go on for hours about the campaign as a whole--its themes of technofascism and social upheaval--but I will save some thoughts for our post-mortem episode, which will come out next week. And if you, dear patrons, have any questions about Lakeshore, put them in the comments on this post!  I will share the answers during a casual AMA on Instagram next week in conjunction with our post-mortem.

Until then!