Urban Shadows: Hollywood 1955 and History Panic

We’ve started a five player campaign of Urban Shadows 2e and I couldn’t be more excited. The first edition is an all-timer, easily in my top five-or-so, sometimes higher depending on the week you ask me. Run it at least a dozen times in the past decade. The new edition of Urban Shadows adds and moves around some stuff, which I’ll talk about in a future deep dive. For now I want to talk about our setting and how I prepped for it. It’s helpful to have a modern resonance in an historic game, but fuck this guy specifically. The initial pitch was “1950s Los Angeles,” which after choosing our Hub – a sort of setting playbook US2e has introduced – evolved into “1955 Hollywood.” The golden age of so much media coming out of California! Movies, television, sci-fi, music. But also the Cold War, the postwar economy, civil rights battles, the Red Scare, the Hollywood Blacklist. The IGRC HQ group ranges from 25 to 60 with representation of every decade in between. It’s always a tossup as to what…