Storyteller’s Urban Fantasy Toolkit
Systemless Sourcebook by Yoru Creative Studio
Storyteller’s Urban Fantasy Toolkit
Your players have walked past the laundromat on the corner a hundred times. It closed for renovations eleven months ago and never reopened. Around the back there’s a door with no handle on the outside, and it opens fine if you know how to knock.
The Storyteller’s Urban Fantasy Toolkit is a GM reference for campaigns set in a modern city with something living underneath it. In this city a vampire court owns two restaurants and a members’ club, half a werewolf pack works in emergency services, and the hardest part of casting a spell is finding a spot where nobody’s phone is pointed at you.
The book has no stat blocks and no spell lists. It covers the setting side of the work: factions, places, people and the pressure between them. Everything is written in plain language, so it drops into whatever system your table already plays.
The whole book comes back to one idea. The supernatural world survives by staying hidden, and staying hidden takes constant effort. Somebody has to patch the ward, pay off the coroner and bury the video before it hits fifty thousand views. Somebody also has to explain to their sister why they missed her birthday again. Each chapter turns that effort into material you can use at the table.
What’s inside
- The hidden world. How concealment works in your city: magic, bureaucracy, and the ordinary human habit of explaining strange things away. It also covers how subways, zoning law and the power grid have been bent to supernatural use, and where the cover is starting to wear thin.
- Magic systems. Four sources of power: bloodline, contract, study, and exposure to strange places. A power scale that measures how visible a working is, not just how strong. Traces that supernatural forensics specialists can read, licensing boards, and a curse-removal business run out of a dry cleaner.
- Twelve factions. A werewolf pack organised around mutual aid. Exiled fae living in decommissioned tunnels. A demon consultancy that is honest about its contract terms, which surprises clients who expected a trick. Each faction gets territory, a concealment method, an internal rift and a stance toward humans. Treaty and conflict generators come after them.
- Sixteen character archetypes (eight playable, eight NPC) built around living a double life. They come with an exposure tracker you keep separately for each relationship, so a character can be under suspicion from a nosy landlord and completely safe at work.
- Twelve antagonists who look like everyone else. A landlord whose leases technically disclose everything. A grief counsellor who takes a small cut of every session. A city councillor who really does get the potholes fixed.
- Nineteen locations. Each has a mundane front that works as a real business, plus three hidden truths for players who dig.
- The masquerade as a system you can run. Who keeps the secret, how a video spreads hour by hour, what memory work can and can’t do, and what happens if the whole thing collapses.
- Twenty-five adventure seeds. Each gives you the surface situation, the hidden layer underneath, the decision it forces, and what happens if the characters stay out of it.
- Random tables in d6, d12 and d20 for names, rumours, sensory details, NPCs, mid-session complications, between-session drift and session zero.
- A quick-reference appendix with a pre-session checklist, a city sheet, a faction tracker and a short reading list.
Rename the factions, move the venues and rewrite the treaties to fit your campaign. The book is a toolbox, and your city is yours to build with it.
| Author(s) | Burak Yaman |
Storyteller’s Urban Fantasy Toolkit is available through DriveThruRPG in PDF.
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