Thought Experiments, Urban Fantasy, and Dresdening Up New York City

[drcpunk.livejournal.com]

On the way home from Games Club, I talked with agrumer about rob_donoghue's article on Dresdening up a city. He said that this sounded like what he'd thought an urban fantasy game should do, that is, tell the reader how to turn their home city, whatever city it was, into a campaign setting for the urban fantasy genre. This is what we both missed when Dreaming Cities came out.

Several years ago, agrumer ran a few sessions of Wander Angels, an urban fantasy game using the F.U.D.G.E. rules, set in New York City. Tonight, he told me some of the stuff that never did come out. The big villain, he said, was going to be a necromancer who worked at the Brooklyn Museum, which, it seems, has the largest collection of Ancient Egyptian artifacts in the world. I didn't know that.

He also told me about the Cleopatra's Needle in Central Park. Well, I knew about the thing, but I didn't realize that its headstone was gold. The gold was stolen the same day it arrived, I gather.

In the world of Wander Angels, the necromancer had the gold headstone in the museum. He also had the ghost of Robert Moses, the most powerful geomancer of the age. One of the NPCs was also a geomancer, though we never learned that.

I asked about the brick oven pizza place agrumer had invented. He explained that this was a sort of Italian cult that fought werewolves. Apparently, there is an Italian legend about this. In the Wander Angels world, the cult had originally come from the cult of Osiris Ra, which agrumer said could also be pronounced as "Osiris Ray".

In fact, he said, there were several pizza places, all founded by different offshoots, all claiming that they had the one true tradition. All of these places served not slices of pizza, but small, whole pies, as a sign of respect for Ra. All of these places, in other words, whatever name they went by, claimed to be the Original Ray's.