(15/41: 2015) ANDREW MEDEIROS
The Second Wave
By 2013, the Powered by the Apocalypse framework had become the dominant engine of indie RPG design. Vincent Baker’s Apocalypse World (2010) established the grammar—2d6+stat, moves that trigger on fiction, playbooks that define character through action rather than inventory. The first wave of PbtA hacks had already arrived: Dungeon World adapted the engine for fantasy adventure, Monsterhearts for queer teenage horror, Monster of the Week for procedural monster-hunting.
Each of these games answered the same question differently: what genre does PbtA serve next?
Andrew Medeiros, a designer based in Kitchener, Ontario, answered by looking at the World of Darkness. Vampire: The Masquerade and its siblings had owned supernatural urban politics since 1991. Players loved the premise—ancient vampires, werewolf packs, mortal hunters, all jockeying for power in a modern city. But the system fought the fiction. White Wolf’s mechanics defaulted to combat resolution, not political maneuvering. The social intrigue that drew players to the setting had no mechanical teeth.
Medeiros started where most PbtA designers started: with free hacks. Star Wars World. A World of Ice and Fire. On The Fraying Edge. These were fan adaptations distributed through Google Drive and the now-defunct Google+ communities—apprentice work, testing how far Baker’s engine could stretch across different fictional skins.
Then he partnered with Mark Diaz Truman, founder of Magpie Games, and the apprentice work became something with real structural ambition.
The Debt Triangle
Urban Shadows (2015) proposed a mechanical solution to the political problem that White Wolf had left unsolved for two decades.
The centerpiece was the Debt system. Characters accumulate social obligations—favors owed, leverage gained, transgressions overlooked. Debts function as currency: spend them to compel action, extract information, or apply political pressure. Refuse to honor a Debt and the mechanics push you toward Corruption. The system transforms interpersonal maneuvering from narrative hand-waving into tracked, consequential exchanges.
This was not invented from nothing. Avery Alder’s Monsterhearts (2012) had introduced Strings—a currency of emotional leverage between characters. Strings let you manipulate, seduce, or pressure other players through mechanical weight. The concept of interpersonal influence as game currency was already in play when Medeiros and Truman sat down to design.
What Urban Shadows added was political structure. Strings operate between individuals in Monsterhearts. Debts in Urban Shadows operate between individuals, factions, and power structures. The currency doesn’t just model attraction and manipulation—it models obligation, patronage, and the transactional nature of supernatural politics. The adaptation is meaningful. But the genealogy is clear.
The second innovation was Faction-Linked Advancement. Characters in Urban Shadows advance not by accumulating generic experience, but by interacting with all four political factions: Mortality, Night, Power, and Wild. Mark your engagement with each Circle on your sheet. When all four are marked, you level up. This forces players out of their narrative comfort zones—the vampire can’t just deal with other vampires. Advancement demands political range.
No prior PbtA game tied progression to factional engagement this way. Apocalypse World advanced characters through highlighted stats. Dungeon World used end-of-session questions. The Faction mechanic was a genuine departure, and it solved a real problem: keeping PbtA characters politically entangled rather than siloed.
The third leg of the triangle was the Corruption Track. Mark Corruption to unlock powerful moves. Fill the track and your character is consumed—retired, lost to darkness. The temptation is deliberate: Corruption offers immediate power at the cost of long-term survival. This echoes the Humanity tracks in World of Darkness, but where those systems primarily punish, Corruption actively tempts. The dual nature—resource and doom clock—generates the moral tension that political horror requires.
When the three subsystems click together, they produce something compelling. Debts push Faction engagement. Faction engagement drives advancement. Corruption offers shortcuts that threaten everything. The triangle is self-sustaining—each corner feeds the others without requiring heavy GM intervention.
The Shared Blueprint
The question that hangs over every assessment of Urban Shadows is the same one that hangs over every co-designed game: who built what?
Medeiros and Truman are credited equally. The Kickstarter ran under Medeiros’s account with Truman listed as collaborator. Amazon credits list both as authors. All official materials name them side by side.
But the specific division of labor—who originated the Debt system, who designed the Faction advancement, who conceived the Corruption mechanic—is not publicly documented in detail. Truman has described his later game Cartel as a direct extension of the work they did together, suggesting genuine creative partnership rather than one person driving while the other assisted. When Magpie Games produced the second edition without Medeiros, Truman executed the design vision solo—but that tells us he could carry the work forward, not who generated the original ideas.
The methodology requires conservative scoring when attribution is ambiguous. Co-designed work carries less weight than solo-authored work for exactly this reason. The Debt-Faction-Corruption triangle is a real contribution. We just can’t say with certainty how much of it belongs to Medeiros alone.
The Solo Work
Medeiros’s work outside the Truman collaboration is smaller in scope but worth examining for what it reveals about his independent design voice.
The Forgotten (2016) is a card-based LARP about civilians surviving a siege. Different decks drive nightly events. Conditions—Wounded, Demoralized, Sick—are applied through card draws rather than dice rolls. A soundtrack serves double duty as ambiance and timekeeping mechanic. The format is distinctive: not tabletop RPG, not traditional LARP, but a hybrid using physical cards and real-time audio to create a sixty-to-ninety-minute experience of communal dread.
Card-based LARP resolution existed before The Forgotten, but the specific combination of card-driven condition tracking with soundtrack-as-timer appears to be Medeiros’s own design. Play reports describe it as emotionally impactful. Formal reviews are scarce.
The Woodlands, funded through Patreon via his personal imprint Northfire Games, was a PbtA game that explicitly required prior experience with another Powered by the Apocalypse game to play. This is a telling detail—it suggests a lighter framework, a design that assumes shared vocabulary rather than building its own from scratch.
These are not the works of a designer producing at scale. They are the works of a designer exploring range within a narrow window. A LARP here. A Patreon experiment there. Each interesting on its own terms, none carrying the structural ambition of Urban Shadows.
The Collaboration That Ended
In 2017, Medeiros co-designed The Watch with Anna Kreider. The game uses PbtA mechanics to model a military unit fighting a supernatural threat called the Shadow, with specific attention to gendered experience and the toll of systemic oppression. The Kickstarter raised over CA$31,000.
The collaboration ended acrimoniously. In November 2019, Kreider publicly described the working relationship as emotionally abusive. She stated that the core concept—the Shadow as patriarchal force—was her idea, and that Medeiros’s design contributions to the final mechanics were less substantial than the shared credit implied. She requested the work be viewed primarily as hers.
These are Kreider’s published, public statements. Medeiros has not made comparable public statements about the collaboration. This assessment includes the documented public record without adjudicating competing accounts. What is factual: the collaboration produced a funded, published game, and the professional relationship did not survive the process.
The Exit
Sometime around 2018, Andrew Medeiros stopped making games.
He transferred his Urban Shadows intellectual property rights to Magpie Games. The second edition Kickstarter, launched in 2020 without his involvement, funded in twelve minutes and raised over $75,000—later climbing past $196,000 through BackerKit. The franchise he co-created continued without him, its commercial viability confirmed by the market’s enthusiasm for more.
Kreider noted in 2019 that Medeiros no longer worked in tabletop roleplaying games. No new published designs have appeared since approximately 2018. The Northfire Games website went quiet. The career, such as it was, lasted roughly five years.
This is not unprecedented. Designers leave. They find other work, other passions, other lives. But the brevity matters for the scoring. Mastery requires sustained engagement with craft—refinement over time, the accumulation of focused design hours, the development of a personal voice through repeated practice. Five years is not enough time. Especially when the strongest work within those five years is collaborative.
The Honest Assessment
The draft analytical essay that accompanies Medeiros’s research dossier runs hot in predictable ways.
It calls the Debt system “pioneered” when Monsterhearts’ Strings is direct, acknowledged prior art. It claims Brendan Conway publicly credited Medeiros for the Influence system in Masks: A New Generation—a claim the research report does not confirm. It states that Faction advancement “significantly pioneered the concept of narrative pacing through factional engagement, which later influenced Root: The RPG and Avatar Legends”—speculative attribution disguised as documented fact. It quietly credits Medeiros with the second edition Quickstart and identifies him as born in Providence, Rhode Island, which appears to conflate him with a different Andrew Medeiros listed as a playwright in New York Theatre Festival materials.
The honest research report is more careful. It flags what it can verify and what it cannot. It identifies Monsterhearts as prior art explicitly. It acknowledges the attribution ambiguity in the Truman collaboration. It describes Urban Shadows’s influence as “real but concentrated within the indie/story game space.”
The research report is the authority. The draft essay is the inflation.
The Scoring Case
Invention (5):
“It was out there, this person implemented it.” The concept of interpersonal leverage as game currency was circulating in PbtA design before Urban Shadows. Avery Alder’s Strings (Monsterhearts, 2012) established the pattern. Medeiros and Truman adapted it for political urban fantasy—a meaningful implementation, but an implementation rather than an origination. The Faction-Linked Advancement is a genuine departure from standard PbtA progression, and the Debt-Faction-Corruption triangle shows creative vision in assembly. But the innovations are co-designed with ambiguous individual attribution, and the nearest prior art is close. The 6 vs. 5 inflection asks whether the designer was ahead of the field or with it. Social leverage currencies were already in play. This was with the field, not ahead of it.
Architecture (5):
“It works.” Urban Shadows achieves its core goal: political supernatural drama through interlocking mechanical subsystems. The Debt-Faction-Corruption triangle is praised as elegant when it clicks, and multiple reviewers call the game one of the best PbtA implementations of its type. But documented structural weaknesses undermine long-term play. The Debt economy can degrade into trackable chits rather than fictional weight. Party cohesion breaks down under the game’s centrifugal character design. Content generation outpaces what groups can incorporate. The system occupies what one reviewer called an “uncanny valley” of complexity—more elaborate than typical PbtA but not robust enough for the sustained campaign play it invites. The sweet spot is twelve to eighteen sessions. The second edition was specifically motivated by fixing structural issues from the first. The system works within its range. It does not transcend it.
Mastery (3):
“Early career or limited depth.” Approximately five years of active design (2013–2018), not full-time. One notable co-designed game, a handful of smaller solo works, and a career that ended before refinement could develop. Some craft evolution is visible—the progression from free PbtA hacks to a commercial co-designed RPG to a solo LARP shows expanding ambition. But the solo works are small in scope, the strongest work is collaborative with ambiguous attribution, and the 10,000-hours threshold for focused design time was not reached. One or two notable designs, real but limited, promise without fulfillment.
Adjustments (+2):
- ■ Longevity 10+ years: No. Active design career approximately 2013–2018, roughly five years.
- ■ Full-time career: No. Game design was not Medeiros’s primary profession. He maintained other employment during his active design period.
- ■ Awards: +1. ENnie Silver for Best Rules (Urban Shadows, 2016). Also nominated for Best Game and Product of the Year. Indie Groundbreaker Awards finalist. Golden Geek Runner Up for Best RPG.
- ■ Branded name: No. Urban Shadows is not recognized by non-gamers.
- ■ Cross-genre success: +1. Tabletop RPGs (Urban Shadows, The Watch) and LARP (The Forgotten) are distinct game formats with successful published designs in each.
- ■ Commercial success: No. Urban Shadows 1E Kickstarter raised $35,209 and sold “thousands of copies” per Magpie Games. Meaningful for indie RPG, nowhere near the $10M threshold.
- ■ Design propagation: No. Some evidence of community adoption—GMs porting Debt and Faction systems into other games, Truman describing Cartel as a direct extension of their shared work, Wikipedia listing Urban Shadows as a notable PbtA game. But the influence is concentrated within the indie/PbtA ecosystem, co-designed with shared propagation credit, and the Debt concept descends from Alder’s Strings. Downstream adoption may propagate the inventor’s concept more than the adapter’s refinement.
The Hidden Pattern
Medeiros designed games where the character’s identity is inseparable from their political debt.
In most RPGs, a character’s stats define what they can do to the world. Strength breaks doors. Dexterity picks locks. The power flows outward. In Urban Shadows, the Debt ledger defines what the world can do to the character. You owe the vampire prince a favor. The werewolf pack remembers your transgression. The mortal detective has leverage over your secret. The power flows inward. The character is not defined by capability but by entanglement.
This is the one idea that threads through everything Medeiros touched. The free hacks were genre adaptations, but even there, he gravitated toward political structures—the factions of Westeros, the power dynamics of Star Wars. The Forgotten puts civilians inside a siege, defined not by what they can do but by what is being done to them. The Watch models the weight of systemic oppression as a mechanical force pressing down on the squad.
The through-line is reactive survival. Characters in Medeiros games are not heroes acting upon the world. They are people entangled in systems that act upon them. The mechanics enforce this. You don’t accumulate power. You accumulate obligation.
Whether this insight belongs to Medeiros alone or emerged from his collaborations is the question the public record cannot answer. What it can confirm is that the insight is real, the implementation is competent, and the career ended before it could mature into something the methodology rewards with higher marks.
What Remains
A Debt system that formalized political leverage for an entire subgenre of PbtA design. A Faction advancement mechanic that forced players into political range. A Corruption track that made power feel like a trap. An ENnie-winning co-designed game that a vocal community still describes as the best PbtA implementation of supernatural urban politics. A LARP that used cards and sound to model siege survival. A franchise that outlived his involvement and raised six figures without him.
And a five-year career that stopped before mastery could arrive.
Medeiros proved he could build the machine. He shared the credit for building it. Then he walked away before anyone could see what he might build alone.
Total: 15 points. Year: 2015.
Total: 15 points. Year: 2015.