Many Realms

DM Notes: Lakeshore 01

Added 2020-02-04 17:00:03 +0000 UTC

Welcome to the first DM Notes of our new Urban Shadows campaign: Lakeshore! We'll be posting DM notes for each regular episode of Many Realms, to offer patrons a look behind the scenes at the making of the show.

A Time and a Place

The titular city that serves as the setting for this campaign is inspired by Toronto in the first half of the 20th century. After setting Tallow in an otherworldly, fantastical giant forest, we were interested in exploring a setting that was slightly more grounded, and we liked the idea of playing in a place with which we were all familiar, while still keeping things surprising.

Fairmont Park is inspired by Toronto's High Park, where Jesse spends a lot of his free time. The Naturalist Society headquarters is styled after the High Park Nature Centre (more in terms of the size and location of the building than any demon-hunting activity).

Fairside as a neighbourhood is a bit of a mashup of a few Toronto locations: Roncesvalles (which lies next to the park and has a lot of residents with Central and Eastern European ancestry) and Kensington Market, a district fiercely proud of its bohemian, vibrant character.

Of course, there are other references to Toronto's present and past that will come up in future episodes, and we'll log them here as they do.

As for the time period in which the game is set, we chose a deliberately anachronistic tone, with a focus on picking and choosing our favourite noir tropes to mash together. Broadly speaking, Lakeshore takes places between the 1920s and the 1950s, with different elements of each decade selected a la carte.

We wanted classic noir scenes of photographic evidence, so Lakeshore has widely available SLR 35mm film cameras. But we also wanted the players to have to be constantly physically exploring the city, so we decided that phones were more on the limited side. Cars are more widely available to allow for possible chase scenes, hiding in trunks or backseats, or other wacky stunts.

We also decided, after a fair bit of conversation, not to feature elements of Prohibition in the setting. It's a classic trope for media set in the 1920s, and very quickly brings to mind flappers, jazz, and smoky backroom bars.

We ultimately opted not to include it because of the feeling that it would dominate a lot of the possible storyline directions. Without it, characters can explore a variety of bars and clubs for different strata of society, but under Prohibition, everything tends to flatten into a singular '20s cliche.

So that's your introduction to some of the choices we made in defining Lakeshore. Our hope is that by including all of our favourite noir setups, the game doesn't get overwhelmed by pure monsters and magic and keeps the urban in Urban Shadows.