i’m sorry did you say street magic: A Review

i’m sorry did you say street magic (which does actually have that capitalisation in its title) is what you might tentatively call a ttrpg, but could more accurately be described as a collaborative worldbuilding exercise. A hack of Microscope by Caro Asercion, it guides the table through creating a city and its neighbourhoods, landmarks and residents. This is not a new game by any means, but we played it recently and it was an absolute riot.

Street Magic‘s main selling point is that it enables the players to build a city that none of them would have been able to dream up individually. Our starting set of adjectives was ‘old’, ‘grungey’, ‘mythic’ and ‘science fiction’ and from there we created a city of advanced technology steeped in old traditions, which harvests dreams to power its spaceships, whose governance and economy borders on the dystopic at times and which is the last bastion of civilisation after a mysterious apocolypse destroyed the rest of the universe - and all in about 4 hours.

Somnia: The City of Dreams at the End of the Universe

In Street Magic players take it in turns to develop parts of the city through building blocks of increasing specifity. The top level elements of the city are its Neighbourhoods, which contain Landmarks which house Residents. Each round, one player gets to declare a ‘compass’, which is essentially the theme for the round. At the end of a given round, the leading player also dreams up an Event, which will affect one or more of these elements in some way (and which are the tented cards on our table above.)

This system works really well, and is excellent for encouraging players who might not normally worldbuild or GM to take the reigns of creation. It relies heavily on the principles of improv, and works especially well if all the players are willing to take on board the ideas suggested by others. While making a given element, the active player has the final say as to what goes on the little flashcard that represents that element, but after that it is on the table for everyone to interact with as they see fit.

Each ‘element’ - Neighbourhood, Landmark, Resident - has certain aspects that need to be detailed by the players. Street Magic encourages conversation, and the written details are meant to be short reminders rather than verbose descriptions - as the game itself says: what is said is more important than what is written. Consequently, the game also places an emphasis on what it calls ‘liminal cartography’ rather than concrete spatial geography: this is a game about stories and emotional connections rather than lines on a map.

Street Magic excels at enabling the players to map out the emotional and social contours of the city they create, and it’s a lot of fun to watch it grow and spread and to see the story of the urban environment unfold over the course of the play session. The only area where Street Magic falls a little short is in the clarity of its terminology. A Neighbourhood, for example, is required to have a Title, a Reputation and a True Name. A title is its commonplace name (in Somnia we had things like ‘The Factory of Sleep’ and ‘The Garden of Paradise’), while its reputation is broadly what its known for and what the inhabitants of the city think of it. The True Name, though, is the bread-and-butter of Street Magic: it’s the vibe of that place. A True Name should ideally comprise two or three sensory images that capture the essence of the location. In Somnia (yes, we called it that for this joke) our Neighbourhoods had True Names like ‘New Tech Propping up the Old’, ‘Nightmare Fuel’, ‘Blinding’, ‘Anything can be bought or sold’. The True Names can be as detailed as desired but should ideally be short and snappy, and it was a lot of fun trying to boil down complex places into a few words or sentences.

Beyond Neighbourhoods, however, the terminology starts to break down a little. Landmarks have Titles, Addresses and True Names, while Residents only have Titles and True Names. At our table, we kept giving Landmarks reputations even though they don’t technically have them - and eventually we decided to swap out ‘Address’ (which is a vague indicator of where in its attached Neighbourhood a Landmark is) for the same Reputation field that Neighbourhoods have. There doesn’t seem to be a reason why the other two elements can’t use the ‘Title’, ‘Reputation’, ‘True Name’ schema that Neighbourhoods use so well, as it just causes confusion to have each of the three building blocks require different descriptions. Furthermore, ‘True Name’, while being a fun descriptor, can at times be difficult to wrap one’s head around. We generally found it easier to refer to it as the ‘Vibe’ of a given element or its ‘Essence’.

Ultimately, this semantic issue doesn’t spoil the game in the slightest, but at our table it did lead to some confusion. At the end of the day though, it doesn’t really matter: the information on the flashcards is for the benefit of the table, and thus can be whatever you want it to be. If you’re sitting down to play Street Magic, it might be worth considering whether you want to house-rule any of the terms, especially if your players seem confused by the given system after having it explained to them.

To sum up, then, we had a lot of fun with Street Magic, and it offers a very different experience to most ttrpgs. Definitely check it out if you’re looking to do something different with your rpg group - or if you want to give people who normally only play a chance to partake in what is usually the GM’s exclusive activity.