Like a lot of people who were young adults in the late 90s and early 00s, I spent evenings watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer and hanging around with at least one black-lipsticked vampire enthusiast. I was not, it must be said, one of them. No eyeliner, no ink, no romantic belief in anything supernatural. I went to a strange private school in LA run by Catholic nuns, spent my free time with stoners and the gifted kids, and mostly specialised in being the one person who could move between cliques without immediately being punched.
So it’s mildly funny that I keep coming back to games about secret supernatural societies, cursed bloodlines and tragic immortals. I don’t believe in ghosts, but apparently I do believe in Drama.
What I’m looking for from these games isn’t “the occult made real.” It’s that familiar itch: awkward people trying to survive power they don’t really control; friendships that double as political alliances; the feeling of being almost part of the in-crowd and very aware of how precarious that is. Gothic urban horror, at its best, is about walking home through a city you know intimately and imagining all the things hiding in the bits the streetlights don’t quite reach.
Let’s talk about a few games that try to bottle that feeling, with Urban Shadows as the centrepiece, and what itch they actually scratch.
Urban Shadows: the city as relationship map
Urban Shadows 2E is very clear about what it thinks urban fantasy is for: “a political urban fantasy roleplaying game” where the city is a web of debts, factions and bad decisions rather than a backdrop for kung-fu montages.
When I ran it set in London, it clicked almost immediately. The game divides the supernatural world into four Circles (Mortalis, Night, Power, Wild) and then basically hands you a Sharpie and says: ruin everybody’s life with this.
Factions keep clocks, make moves off-screen, and periodically smash into the PCs’ lives like a lorry through a kebab shop. The Faction Turn rules formalise that “city keeps moving when you’re not looking” feeling I love and that I now pinch for almost every campaign I run.
Mechanically, it’s still Powered by the Apocalypse: playbooks, 2d6+stat, moves that trigger off specific fiction, and a lot of “tell us how you feel while the city eats you.” My reservation with PbtA generally is that the moves can step out from behind the curtain a bit too often. There’s a certain mood whiplash to saying “my ex shows up at the club with her new demon boyfriend and my secret gets out” and someone replying “cool, mark XP and roll +Heart to Let It Out.”
But when I stopped worrying about doing it “properly” and only brought in moves when it mattered, Urban Shadows sang. The mechanics did exactly what I wanted: they tracked obligations, corruption and power; they made every favour and secret a loaded gun; and then they got out of the way while we argued in character about who owed whom a drink.
If your formative years involved navigating multiple cliques, never quite sure where you “really” belonged, Urban Shadows is very good at letting you relive that. This time with vampires, wizards and immigration lawyers who moonlight for the Fae.
Monster of the Week: Scoobies on tour
Monster of the Week is, in theory, the perfect companion piece: a PbtA game built to emulate Buffy, Supernatural, X-Files and anything where a found family of idiots drives around hitting monsters with improvised theology.
It’s structurally solid: mysteries are built around threats with countdown clocks, each with their own “if nobody stops this, everything goes to hell” trajectories. There are only a handful of basic moves, and for the Keeper there’s a lot of good advice on improvising and letting the mystery grow out of play rather than front-loading a whole plot.
My experience, though, was as a player in a game where both I and the GM were new to PbtA and still in that anxious “Are We Doing It Right?” phase. Playing a werewolf-ish type should have been joyous messy catharsis; instead we spent a lot of time trying to remember which move fit the moment. The fiction-first ethos works beautifully when everyone is relaxed about it. When you’re not, the rules feel less like a spotlight and more like a speed bump.
Compared to Urban Shadows, Monster of the Week scratches a slightly different itch. It’s less about factions and politics, more about “this week’s horror and what it does to the gang.” When it works, it hits that lovely space of “awkward lads with trauma solving problems very badly.” When it doesn’t, you’re painfully aware you could probably get a similar effect from just grabbing Call of Cthulhu or another familiar system and rolling some skills.
Buffy & Angel: cinematic therapy with Drama Points
The Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel RPGs are, in some ways, the purest expression of that late-90s itch. They run on Cinematic Unisystem: attributes + skills, roll a d10, add Drama Points when you’re about to be eaten or want to deliver a truly killer quip. The text leans into Episodes, Seasons and character-driven subplots, explicitly telling you how to structure a series and reward emotional suffering.
Buffy is all about the balance between Heroes (Slayers, Champions) and White Hats (your Xanders and Willows), with Drama Points helping the powerless still matter when the fists and fangs come out. The game keeps reminding you that witty dialogue, emotional meltdowns and bad life choices are as worthy of mechanical reward as staking things.
What I love here is how shamelessly the system centres the ensemble. It absolutely understands that the real horror of Buffy is not “vampire in the park,” it’s “trying to revise for finals while a hellmouth opens under your social life.” The RPG supports that with rules for emotional crises, relationship subplots and the general Agony That Is Life.
Compared to Urban Shadows, Buffy/Angel feel more directed and more comfortable with melodrama. The mechanics rarely get in the way because they’re fairly traditional; you can run them almost like a light skill-based system and sprinkle Drama Points when things get particularly on-brand. They’re less about long-term political pressure and more about cathartic arcs: hit rock bottom, cry in the graveyard, get a slow-motion shot as you stand back up.
Liminal: Britain is weird, actually
Liminal is the game that quietly says: “Look, Britain is already uncanny; we’re just admitting it.” It’s a modern UK urban fantasy about people caught between the mundane world and the Hidden World – changelings, haunted detectives, werewolf gang members with jobs and mortgages.
The structure is traditional but neat. You play as a Crew, a group who share a purpose and some resources. You take on cases: strange disappearances, fae politics spilling into estate disputes, magical crimes the police can’t put on a form. The rules are simple d6+skill affairs; the real weight is in the setting: a lovingly weird tour of cities, folklore and factions across Britain.
If Urban Shadows is about how power works in big American-feeling cities, Liminal is about how it feels to stand in a rainy British underpass and realise the graffiti is older than the country. It’s more low-key, more melancholy. Violence exists, but it’s not a punch-up every session; the drama comes from obligations to Courts, packs and secret societies, and from your own fractured identity.
As someone who tends to occupy the edges of groups, that “caught between” pitch feels uncomfortably accurate. Liminal is less goth-club and more late-night bus stop. It doesn’t shout as loudly as Vampire or Urban Shadows, but it might actually be closer to how my own internal urban fantasy monologue sounds.
Vampire: the Masquerade V5 – when the goth kids got old
Vampire, especially in its fifth edition, is the grandparent of all this: the original “what if you were the monster, but sad about it?” game. V5 doubles down on the personal horror angle with mechanics like Hunger dice, Touchstones, Convictions and detailed coterie and relationship maps.
The book opens with a mature content warning that reads like a checklist of everything your parents worried you were into: abuse, extremism, exploitation, all framed as things to explore critically rather than glorify. It’s trying very hard to be about something: power, complicity, how much you’re willing to do to keep your place in a predatory hierarchy.
In play, and I’ve run Fall of London a couple of times, it’s intense, sometimes gloriously so. The mix of political factions, messy feeding scenes and the constant risk of losing control speaks directly to that late-90s itch: being part of a glamorous, awful in-crowd and realising you’re still the same awkward person underneath the leather coat.
And sometimes, when the dice goes wrong, it is farce. When your break in trips up because you lose control and drink the guard or when you don’t realise the power imbalance between you and an Elder vampire, getting yourself curb stomped. The power fantasy quickly dies when you realise in most good games of VtM you are not the apex predator you think you are.
Compared to Urban Shadows and Liminal, though, V5 is heavier in every sense. There’s more rules weight, more lore, more expectation that you’ll engage with capital-M Metaplot. It’s less a flexible framework for any city and more a very specific world with capital-C Clans and capital-J Jyhad. That’s brilliant if what you want is full-fat gothic tragedy; it’s less ideal if you’re just trying to sketch your own weird version of London with factions you invented in the shower.
So what itch are we actually scratching?
If I try to reverse-engineer what these games, and the shows they’re riffing on, did for younger me, it’s not about believing in vampires. I never did, even when I was sat in the corner of a flat in black jeans listening to someone explain their sire.
What they did offer was a way to dramatise the stuff that felt huge and unmanageable at the time: class, race, sexuality, money, popularity, loneliness. Being from somewhere else, culturally and economically; moving between crowds without ever being sure which one was “yours”; watching the shiny kids burn out or burn others. It’s all there, just with better lighting and the occasional stake.
Urban Shadows turns that into a game explicitly about power, debts, and corruption, where every favour has a cost and every Clique Friend is also a potential knife in the back.
Buffy and Angel give you a structure to play through messy coming-of-age stories where the biggest horror is realising you’re responsible for your own life now.
Liminal lets you explore being a permanent inbetweener in a country that excels at awkwardly pretending nothing is wrong.
Monster of the Week lets you be the weirdos who notice that something is wrong and decide to hit it with a shovel.
Vampire asks what happens when you finally get invited into the dark, glamorous circle and discover the entry fee was your reflection.
Mechanically, they all sit in different places on the spectrum. Urban Shadows and MotW ask you to bring the moves into the foreground; Buffy/Angel and Liminal are closer to familiar skill-based play with some story-aware tools; Vampire is its own sprawling thing.
My personal trick, learned the hard way, is not to treat any of them as sacred. Use the bits that help you tell the kind of stories you care about (outsiders, relationships, power, compromise) and quietly shove the rest behind the metaphorical sofa.
Because in the end, what TTRPGs give those of us who stick around isn’t just “a few hours of structured make-believe.” They give us a safe, communal way to rehearse being braver, or weaker, or kinder, or more monstrous than we are. They let the skeptic sit at a table, roll some dice and say, with a straight face: “I’m a vampire wizard with commitment issues,” and then spend three hours figuring out what that actually means for the people around them.
And honestly, that’s a lot healthier than buying a long black coat and pretending to enjoy clove cigarettes.