[OSSR]Unknown Armies

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Chamomile
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Post by Chamomile »

Doesn't consensus reality mean we can make there be things in space just by passing around Drake's Equation with some favorable inputs to enough wizards who don't know enough to realize that the variables are so difficult to calculate that it's basically an arbitrary declaration?
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Post by hogarth »

Ancient History wrote:It would be like if Batman stopped fighting crime for a bit to travel the world beating the shit out of the other Batman-types just to prove he was the One True Batman.
Seriously, how can you have that sentence without a reference to this:

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Post by Ancient History »

name_here wrote:
Ancient History wrote:there's nothing in the cosmos. All the stars over your head, the entire galaxy, every other galaxy, and the entire universe out to 12 billion lightyears in every direction is empty void without life or purpose. The Earth is all there is, and even the 8 billion years of universe history before there was an Earth was in some incoherent way a lie. In reality the Earth has been made and remade repeatedly and that's all that matters.
...What.

WHY?

What possible reason is there to declare the rest of the universe doesn't actually exist? I mean, they get a pass on the history thing because hypothetically the setting has dudes who can shake the very foundations of reality and bend time itself to their wishes, but why declare there is nothing in space?
Because that way the truth isn't "out there." If there's no meaning or life or purpose outside of Earth, that makes Earth all-important and encourages soul-searching and internal journeys.

Now, I'm not arguing for that - I'm just presenting it as the reason they went with it. I still think it's bullshit.
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Post by Whipstitch »

I guess they really like closing doors in an already threadbare setting. The dumb part is that I'm provisionally okay with shutting down bum fights in spaaaaaace as long as you're going somewhere with it. It's game with fucking dipsomancers and tin foil hat rituals, ffs. I'd be A-OK with NASA being an elaborate hoax for reasons even weirder than you'd first guess. C'mon guys, your game is named Unknown Armies. Give me Jesse Ventura and faked moon landings or gtfo.
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Longes
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Post by Longes »

name_here wrote:...What.

WHY?

What possible reason is there to declare the rest of the universe doesn't actually exist? I mean, they get a pass on the history thing because hypothetically the setting has dudes who can shake the very foundations of reality and bend time itself to their wishes, but why declare there is nothing in space?
It's not "The rest of the universe doesn't exist", it's "The universe is devoid of life, except for Earth."
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Post by silva »

That statement is a twist on the Chulhusque motto of "outer space threats that will end life on earth". To Unkonwn Armies its the very humanity that will crap all over the place and end life on earth. WE are the greatest threats to ouselves. Its a humanocentric motto.
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Post by John Magnum »

How ~evocative~.
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Post by Ancient History »

Book Three: Part Two:
Angels & Demons


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Music: Scot Bradlee's - We Can't Stop
FrankT:

The latter half of Book Three is split into three chapters, but it's only 14 pages total. Chapter headers and footers take up a really considerable amount of this section. Any or all of this information could have been merged into other chapters or even other books and that would have been fine.
AncientH:

Yet, it still manages to fuck over adepts. Amazing.

Chapter Fourteen: Assumption and Ascension
FrankT:

At six whole pages, this is the longest “chapter” in the section. It's about how you can win the game and stop playing as an Avatar. This could honestly have just been in the Avatar section in the previous book. It wouldn't have made Avatar magic even half as long as the rest of the magic, so I don't see how anyone would care.

Assumption is where you take the place of the archetype's godwalker like you were an AD&D Druid and you had an old man you had to beat up to get to 16th level. The godwalker is basically the god's understudy. Once you're the understudy, you can Ascend, which is where you become the god and the god loses his space in heaven. It's basically like Black Swan, but with Jungian archetypes instead of ballet leads.

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Nina in this case would get an open assumption of the godwalker position once Beth retires. By achieving both the White Swan and Black Swan nature, Nina ascends to archetype status and leaves mortal existence. This is unfortunately, more interesting than what is actually written in this chapter.
AncientH:

Ascension is becoming the archetype; assumption is becoming the godwalker. The latter becomes a possibility when your Avatar rating hits 99%. Or, basically, never in the normal course of play, because that would require years and years of sessions. But if you get lots of points and the skill restrictions are relaxed, you could potentially do it at chargen in a cosmic-level campaign. There's not really a lot of middle ground.

There's supposed to be a deal between "closed assumption" (ritual murder of existing godwalker after symbolic - and probably literal - defeat), or "open assumption," where the current godwalker breaks a taboo and falls from their status.
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Take my word that this is relevant.
FrankT:


Not only can there be only one, but when there's less than one there gets to be one pretty quick. When one of the Avatars falls from godwalker status, all the avatars with 98 in their avatar skill have a battle royale or danceoff or something to determine who gets to be the next divine understudy. I like how it just casually slips in there that “all” of the people with 98 in a specific Avatar skill get the notice. Like there's a lot of them or something. It's so at odds with all the worldbuilding they've done so far that it really sticks out. Few people know about magick, only a minority of those people even know that the path of the Avatar is an actual thing you can do, only a tiny fraction of those people manage to stay on the path long enough to get anywhere without violating taboos, and there are apparently three hundred plus fucking archetypes and they all get their own understudy and the Avatars of one can't be the Avatars of any of the others. How there are ever more than two or three people who can claim the coveted understudy position for any archetype at one time is totally beyond me.
AncientH:

Aside from that precious 99th percentile, the major benefit of being a godwalker is being able to define your own unique channel. Given examples include "Cannot be killed by Israelis." (Ibrahim al Masrah, godwalker of the Executioner) and "No other avatar of the Masterless Man can channel the archetype when fighting me." (Toshishiro Yamamura, godwalker of the Masterless Man and fucking munchkin) and "For a price, I can rewrite your past - don't like having cancer? For enough money, you can never have had it." (Thorvald Drake, godwalker of the Merchant)

I'm of two minds about these abilities: on the surface, these are all dickish super-NPC powers that are all likely gamebreaking and the PCs will never get a chance to have them. On the other hand, these are the sort of abilities that would actually make a cosmic campaign interesting, and the sorts of things that player characters want and should be able to get.

Also we get a new skill, Symbolsight. It's a weird skill in that you're basically buying percentiles in experiencing hallucinations connected with magickal symbolic things - like you see the Eifel Tower and it is simultaneously the Eifel Tower and a great iron penis jutting into the sky, symbol of the Maleocentric Maleocracy.

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Nominally it helps identify godwalkers and shit too, but seriously, what the fuck?
FrankT:

The really weird thing is that there isn't a similar chapter for Adepts. The previous chapter gave some ideas on what each type of Adept might have to do in order to get the special third kind of Adept currency: the Major Charge. But there's no indication of what you'd actually do if you got one. You'd think that you could give a half page rundown of ideas of things cosmic hobo adepts could do with major charges for each type of adept and then you'd have another one of these 6 page bullshit chapters and you wouldn't have shat on the whole 2nd book. It's not like you couldn't add six more pages to this thing, and it isn't like there ain't six pages worth of bullshit to cut. But um... they didn't do that. If there are any reasons for it, I don't know what they are.

Chapter Fifteen: Demons

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FrankT:

The big reveal of this book is that Demons are actually just Ghosts and that therefore almost everything they told you about demons in the previous book was wrong. It makes sweeping generalizations about what “Demons” know and want and act like... but none of that makes any fucking sense. It's not like there's a “team demon” that everyone has to join before they become a wandering spirit, it's just that apparently your grandfather turns into an arrogant sorcery-knowing deal making body snatcher the moment he kicks it and you contact him with a ouija board. I just... I don't know. This is actually harder for me to swallow than the no-cosmos cosmos. And way harder to swallow than this delicious mead.

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Demons in Unknown Armies are basically Crowley from Supernatural except that there isn't any Infernal hierarchy or special selection of evil souls to explain why he's like that.
AncientH:

The demons chapter gets started right away with Demon Summoning and possession, which except for using a proper spell or ritual is a bit like the old telephone partyline and seeing who's on. There's no official skill for summoning demons, though I can't imagine why fucking not, so contests with demons are all "you roll your Soul rating against the Demon's Soul rating, may the highest Soul rating win." And yes, demons can possess unwilling victims if they have an appropriately high Soul rating (80+). Which really means that I should be able to start the game as a "sensitive" who opens themselves up to channel demons, and that wouldn't be the freakiest chargen option.

Demon abilities are quite nebulous. They can teach you to be an adept, if you aren't one yet, and they can help you build an artifact, and they can serve as magical spies. And they can possess your body and go rape people at random.

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Also, you can't usually specify who you're trying to call up.
FrankT:

There's a whole thing on binding demons into your body and forcing them to do shit and bargaining with them and shit. None of this matters because the actual demon writeups are in the gamemaster's section, which you aren't supposed to read. It helpfully reminds you that the only demon summoning rituals worth anything in the book are actually adept powers written up in the last book in the book. So really I don't understand why any part of this chapter is in this section of the book. Every single piece of information here could have been in Book 2 and made more sense there.
AncientH:

Seriously, even soulsipping is in the last book.

Chapter Sixteen: Artifacts

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FrankT:

The final “chapter” in book 3 is only 3 pages long. The chapter ends with some whitespace, and the chapter header is a good chunk of a page, so there's really like 2 pages worth of actual text in here. Since artifacts do pretty much whatever the MC says they do and can in some cases be used by people with no mojo or understanding at all, this chapter really would have made a lot more sense to include in say... Book One.
AncientH:

Like every other vaguely urban paranormal game (including all of the various White Wolf ones), Unknown Armies likes to make a distinction between natural artifacts and constructed artifacts. Constructed artifacts are the tools a magician makes for themselves - amulets, athames, govi bottles, etc. - although they don't really give you any good examples of this in the adept or avatar sections besides some spell-products.

Anywhere, there are some no-frills (but fairly quick and easy) rules for creating Minor, Significant, and Major artifacts (limited use and eternal use). In fact, so far as I can tell it's the only use for Major charges that currently exists. Artifacts pretty much just replicate other magickal effects, but given random magic, that means they can do pretty much fucking anything.
FrankT:

Natural Artifacts happen when big magical events happen. Shit goes down and then random stuff in the area turns into special objects with weird powers and unknown purposes. Then cabals descend on the area and try to collect all the stuff and figure out what it does. So basically it's exactly The Lost Room. To the point that I wonder if any of the people working on The Lost Room were Unknown Armies players.

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Detective Miller wore it better.
AncientH:

This was a big thing! In Marvel, for example, Adolf Hitler's luger that he committed suicide with is one of the most powerful anti-magic weapons around.

http://www.marvunapp.com/Appendix/hitlerad.htm

http://www.marvunapp.com/Appendix5/brig ... tm#handgun
FrankT:

The sample artifacts are there to troll you.
AncientH:

No, seriously, they're four Minor artifacts, one of which is a Lucky Charm. No examples are given of Significant or Major artifacts. Designer fail.
Last edited by Ancient History on Wed Mar 05, 2014 11:25 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by Ancient History »

Book Four: Part One:
For the Gamemaster


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Music: Nirvana - The Man Who Sold the World
FrankT:

Clocking in at 108 pages, this is the second longest section in the book. This section is absolutely off limits to all players of all power levels, and talks to you man to man as a gamemaster. There are six chapters and some appendices in this section, but the first three chapters are already more than half the section at 66 pages, so we'll include the appendices with the second part (and conclusion) of the book.
AncientH:

Okay, so I think it's time to be real with you here: this isn't a typical urban fantasy RPG. I think you've already kinda gathered that, but I want to make it explicit. It's not that every book peels back more of the onion to reveal the festering occult world teeming underneath, it's that the book is deliberately designed to conceal information from the reader, which means that any poor sumbitch playing Mister Cavern is going to have a bitch of a time putting everything together. Seriously, if this RPG was better organized, I could probably cut the pagecount in half AND double the actual content. All the rituals, one chapter BOOM, DONE. All the artifacts, one chapter BOOM, DONE. All the avatar rules one chapter BOOM...you get the idea.

I honestly don't know if that's part of the ongoing appeal of the game among a select crowd or not. I know that I was fucking pissed when I got to the section on lycanthropes and demons and shit and said out loud "Why the fuck wasn't this even fucking hinted at earlier?"...and the reason is, of course, because the players aren't supposed to know, because the player characters aren't supposed to know. It's the whole scrabbling around in the dark feeling you get, where you don't even know what's within the realm of possibility, and maybe you can rip the mask off the monster at the end and maybe it's decomposing face comes off in a gooey mass of decayed skin and greasy hair. I get that, I just don't like how they went about it. But if they did it any other way, we probably wouldn't be talking about this book.
Sometimes novel design is undistinguishable from incompetence.
Chapter Seventeen: GM Overview

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What's good for GM is good for the country.
AncientH:

Here is the Occult Underground.
We've been getting these little snippets at the beginning of every book, and they're really sort of the basic design document in four sentences. Or if not, they should be. There is a great deal implied in these theses, but they never quite deliver. You might expect, for example, that here you will finally get the low-down on the occult underground that's been sporadically addressed throughout this book, maybe get an idea on how to really run an Unknown Armies campaign.
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Stand back, you fools!
FrankT:

This chapter is where the designers talk directly to the GM and tell them everything they feel like the people actually running the game should know. And one of the most important things you should know is that almost all of the big secrets they were throwing around are bullshit and have no answers. They come out and level with you, the gamemaster, that all the crap about the afterlife is just a red herring and they really don't know or care what the whole list of archetypes look like and probably half of them or so are unfilled and don't worry about it. They give the low down on the Comte de Saint Germain, which is that you know, whatever.

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So the structure of the book is that the players are supposed to go through multiple layers of initiation, at each new level being told that some (most) of the things from the previous level were bullshit but being given new truths which are closer to the big truth. Then the GM gets to be at the deepest level, where the big reveal is that it's all bullshit and the GM is just supposed to string players along, keeping the long con going as long as possible by using spooky voices and spouting cryptic deepisms. Given that premise, it seems very strange that there are 106 more pages in this chapter. Having given the game away and essentially admitted that there honestly isn't a game in here, the rest of the pages could honestly be blank. But mysteriously, they are full of text.
AncientH:

I get the feeling that Tynes and Stolze were trying to be meta. The essential problem to these kind of initiation puzzles reminds me a great deal of Roger Ebert's summary of The Ninth Gate:
Roman Polanski's "The Ninth Gate," a satanic thriller, opens with a spectacularly good title sequence and goes downhill from there--but slowly, so that all through the first hour there is reason for hope, and only gradually do we realize the movie isn't going to pay off. It has good things in it, and I kept hoping Polanski would take the plot by the neck and shake life into it, but no. After the last scene, I underlined on my note pad: What?

...

It's just that a film of such big themes should be about more than the fate of a few people; while at the end I didn't yearn for spectacular special effects, I did wish for spectacular information--something awesome, not just a fade to white.
It's a fundamental problem, and it's not unique to Unknown Armies or the Ninth Gate. It's something that Umberto Eco really underlined and wrestled with in Foucault's Pendulum: there is no great magickal truth. No ultimate secret knowledge that perfects the world, no goal to work for except those we set for ourselves, no ultimate occult authority behind it all. They could have ran with that in a different, more humanist way - let the PCs see behind the lies of the charlatans and self-deluded, let them make something of themselves, figure out what they want to do and let them do it. Instead, they tell Mister Cavern to keep the PCs chasing shadows down the rabbit hole.
FrankT:


There are extended writeups for eight of the various groups that got name dropped in earlier books in the book. Each one gets an average of three and a half pages, so it's not really that extended. But it's longer than the off hand mention they got in the player section. What's really strange about all this, is that some of these groups are nominal player character factions. I would think the little spiel about how the Cult of the Naked Goddess or Mak Attack got their start and what they believe would be useful to players who were considering running a campaign where they were members of those organizations. But I guess I'm just old fashioned like that.

About the only big reveal in the Cult of the Naked Goddess writeup is that when they didn't mention Adepts in book three except as a page citation in the oddly misplaced demon chapter, it wasn't because they forgot. It's because the authors apparently regard Avatar magic as “true magickal ascension” while the path of the Adept is... something else. Not true magick? Fuck if I know. It's a false path or something. Basically: the authors are trolling players hard. A very large amount of this book is composed of false paths to lead players astray so the GM and game designers can laugh at them. The book is honestly pretty dickish.
AncientH:

There's a lot of crap on the House of Renunciation and its Agents, which seriously is a bit like the Outer Church from Grant Morrison's The Invisibles except less interesting in every conceivable way.
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The Sleepers, it turns out, are basically there to enforce the Masquerade and are an ancient and venerable magickal order. Except they're not, really, it's just a magickal serpent eating its own tail because the "ancient" guild was brainwashed in 1945 by a now-defunct group of Chinese mystics into believing that. You ever notice that every group in this setting is entertaining some form of self-delusion?

By the way, they give you stats for a typical agent of each of these groups, and they suck about as bad as you'd expect. They're not optimized, so they're going to fail more often than they succeed, and not just at magickal tasks, but mundane shit too.

The New Inquisition starts out as one man's attempt to control magick, and then rapidly goes into telling you why adepts suck because they can't plan.

Mak Attack just wants to bring magic to the masses. They are 500 members strong, which is quite a lot by occult underground standards, and their established means to do this is to get wageslave jobs at McDonalds ("the Scotsman") and dispense magickal wisdom with the happy meals and Big Macs, and conduct big joint rituals which might have resulted in the 9/11 attacks (hey, a part that was added after the first edition!)

I don't honestly remember a lot about the Global Liberation Society from earlier in the book, but these are basically anarchists who group together in an effort to take down "hierarchical power structures." Also, they secretly want to blow up the world to make a better one. Really, they're cartoon supervillains, and just about as inept as COBRA.

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Hellboy has more competent villains.

The Order of St. Cecil are what the New Inquisition should be: death to all magick users, death to all magick. Ultimate antimagickal goon squad.

Satan's Chosen Temple: a goth-girl does the ouija-board-in-a-cemetery-at-midnight bit and accidentally learn how to summon demons, and this snowballs into her setting up her own little Satanic religion. The head goth-girl can call 'em up and exorcise 'em, but seems stuck in thinking they're actual Christian-esque demons, and her ambitions seem to top out at money, sex, magickal powers, and cool clothes.

I actually think some of these are usable groups, although the "adepts are dumbasses" bit still grates.
FrankT:

Like most masquerades, it seems like it would be a lot of work to hide the magic in this setting. Several of the player character factions are attempting to get rid of it and teach the mundanes about magick. This seems like it would be extremely easy. You lay some magic down on TV, and then... you're done. People believe in magic. It's like the whole Traditions in Mage or the Sabbat in Vampire, I'm genuinely unclear as to why or how they haven't won already.

Now part of it might be explained away as them having just really terrible plans. The Mak Attaxers apparently work at McDonalds and periodically give mystical revelations to people waiting for their happy meals. This seems like a stupid plan, and really even when they describe the deep inner workings for the game master's eyes only... it still seems like a really stupid plan. You'd think there would be some deep conspiratorial reason why everyone goes to work at McDonalds and fights magical threats on the side, but there really isn't. The authors just thought the image was funny and/or cool and there's no thought behind it at all.

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May need to work on this plan a bit.
AncientH:

After that, they give us "GMCs" - these are random NPCs in normal gamespeak parlance. NPCs are actually an important part of the game ecology because they give players an idea of the possible; sticking them back here in the GM-only section is fairly worthless. Worse than that, the stats are terrible. "Jim Smith" has Speak English 45%, and that's his highest language skill.

Also, we get two non-magickal street-level NPCs and then two global-level Dukes (one of which doesn't have any magic, but has the Distracting Breast Implants 45% skill and a hand of glory) and then three cosmic-level NPCs, one of whom doesn't get stats (The Freak), and the other two who don't have the skills to justify their position there.

Then we get three generic characters "Average Police Officer," "Average Police Detective," and "Stock Thug."

...why fucking bother?
FrankT:

For reasons that defy ready analysis, we get fairly specific character sheet information for a bunch of dudes you'll probably never meet. For example, we know exactly how many hardened and failed sanity checkboxes are filled in on all five tracks on... a burger flipper in DeKalb, Illinois... a murderous anarcho-terrorist who seems like an easy going bro... a homeless woman crashing on a satanic couch. This might actually be useful if there was a generic NPC list or something, but there isn't. Each of these characters is squirreled away into the writeup of one of the groups. There's no easy way to browse these things and they don't constitute a 'Monster Manual' for this game – that part (such as it is) comes next. These are just there to make most of the writeup of each group so small scale as to be nearly useless, with each one buried deeply enough that the only way you're going to use the statline of “Lili Morgan” is if you're actually fighting against (or for) the rooms of the renunciation house and specifically have to deal with specifically Lili. Her writeup takes up two thirds of the damn page.

These writeups also underline how bullshit this whole “no skill list” thing really is. The aforementioned Lili Morgan has a fucking “cheap shot fighting” skill. Can she even use that after she has already hit a dude? I don't fucking know. Another character has “shoot hoops” as a skill. Someone else has “make gobs of money.” What the actual fuck? Characters don't have skills like “drive” or “repair things” or “do their fucking job” or whatever, so apparently pretty much everyone fails at their normal tasks automatically if they have to make a major check in any routine action. Also, what the hell kind of bullshit merchant are you if you only make gobs of money 75% of the time?
AncientH:

Better than the guy who can only speak English 25% of the time.

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The Captain: I'm The Captain-- --I'm from **** Brooklyn-- --and I can barely understand **** English!
-Warren Ellis, Nextwave
FrankT:

The monster manual is six pages long. NPCs are called “GMCs” which is hilarious when you think of all these people as cars. There are seven extremely specific characters, one of whom has no stats because it is an eyeroll inducing “unstoppable, unkillable, near-omniscient plot device” and the other six are distributed two per tier (street, global, and cosmic, although of course those words still don't mean what the authors think they mean). There are also three generic characters: police officer, police detective, and thug. You might think that you should get stats for reporters or guard dogs or fucking innocent bystanders, but you don't. Because go fuck yourself.

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Also worth noting: this isn't the monster manual with the demons or those snow revenants mentioned in Book 2. That's in a different part of the book. Also because go fuck yourself.

Chapter Eighteen: GM Campaigns

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As opposed to Anti-GM Campaigns.
AncientH:

I don't know what else they were supposed to call this chapter. "Campaigns," maybe. "Campaign Planning." Really it's just a collection of...not campaign ideas, but all sorts of talk about atmosphere and narrative and thematics and oh my fuck how fucking old are we that we have to read this shit again?

I don't know that I've ever read a good section on campaigns, but you generally can't go wrong by following the three simple rules:

1) You need a struggle or goal bigger than any one character
2) You need to keep the focus on the PCs
3) The actions of the PCs need to have a measurable effect

That probably sounds too simple, but you'd be amazed at how easy they are to fuck up. "Alienation" as a theme for a game sounds like a great idea, but it's harder to pull off for a group of characters than it is for one character - and UA is already a game where the individual character can overwhelm the table-time just by talking. Likewise, it's easy to get lost in the convoluted plans/confrontations of the NPCs or the plot-railroad to get the PCs to the next big scene you have planned - but you don't ever really want the players to be sitting there at the table listening as you have two MC-penis NPCs talk over them, an audience to the MC's little psychodrama. And, finally, the player character's actions (or inaction, as the case may be) needs to have some visible effect. Even if it's only that the sun rises one more time.
FrankT:

This ten page chapter is pretentious even by the standards of this book. It attempts to get you to refer to serial storytelling as “picaresque.” That is not actually what that word means. Like, I could totally understand if someone described picaresque fiction to you and you came away with the idea that it meant a series of sequential stories with their own self contained beginnings, middles, and ends, but that's really really not what the fucking word means. Once again, the authors are spending so much effort at looking cultured and in-the-know that they end up leaving their fly unzipped and their ignorance hanging out for everyone to see.

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The actual meaning of picaresque, if you were wondering.
AncientH:

There's a little bit of stuff on plotlines that is almost useful, but really it looks like it was cribbed hastily out of a "how to write" handbook. There's no there there, nothing to really tie the advice in to the game setting. It's pretty generic, and blah, and not fucking useful.
FrankT:

This chapter frankly has no business being in the GM section at all. One of the core unanswered questions of Unknown Armies from the player's perspective is “What the fuck are we supposed to do?” This chapter presents themes you might want to employ and campaign structures you might want to hang the game on... but it presents them to the game master. That is bullshit. Whether you're going to play a one shot or a campaign is not up to the MC of the game to fucking fiat from heaven, it's a group decision. The other players need to be in on this, because they are either going to show up at the flat one day or one day a week for the next four months. That's a really big difference in time commitment, and you can't just bulldozer that shit onto people under any circumstances.
AncientH:

Even failure can be satisfying, however. No, really.

Right now you may be scratching your head. "You mean that my players, who've been meeting every Wednesday night for eight months working towards taking over the world--they're going to be satisfied with an ending where they don't take over the world?"

It can be done, but only if they choose not to take over the world.
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Good luck with that, guys.

For the victory to be sweet, there has to exist a chance of failure. Failure is, in many cases, the price of success. If you're not willing to allow your PCs to lose, then their victories are hollow. Let them fucking fail.
FrankT:

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This chapter actually suggests that the MC should make one of these. I genuinely don't understand why you would do this, but I've been told by some people that they find this sort of preparation useful. It's really hard for me to even evaluate this stuff, because the preparation it is suggesting looks way too fiddly to me. The map isn't the territory, and I don't really get how a bunch of lines with words like “disdain” on them really help you write a story. But different strokes for different folks. Also, those other folks are assholes and I'm right and they are wrong and all that.
AncientH:

Do whatever is satisfying.
THis basically sums up the whole fucking chapter.

Chapter Nineteen: Running the Game

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I don't know either.
FrankT:

Chapter 19 is also 19 pages long, which would be a clever numerology thingy if they had done anything clever like that with the rest of the book at all. Mostly, I think that's a random coincidence. This chapter gives the MC weird and pretentious advice for storytelling. They want you to use funny voices and hand out props. Yes, really. There's some good advice (for example: don't contradict yourself when describing things), some bad advice, and really a lot of pretentious advice. Really none of this has to do with Unknown Armies per se, it's a fairly extended “What is Roleplaying” section, and it starts on page 275 of the book and is supposed to be secret from most of the people playing the damn game. Actual things that are actually relevant to the game this book is nominally about start on page 280. So it really spends quite a bit of ink ranting about the author's theories of narrative flow and preferred amounts of setting description detail.
AncientH:

I'm not clear on how this advice differs from the bullshit they were spouting in the previous chapter.
FrankT:

Much of the basic rules on skill checks, wound points, and combat initiative are here because they are secret rules and the player characters aren't supposed to know what the speed threshold to get an extra action is. It's hard to make sense of this, since the other half of these purposefully incomplete rules are separated by over two hundred pages in this fucking book, but even joined together it appears to be incomplete and kind of horseshit. There is a rant about how you have significant leeway when deciding whether to make a check be minor, significant, or major. This rant is called “Fuzzy Logic” and is all about hot this is non-Boolean logic states, which is not what fuzzy logic is or what it's for and seriously what the actual fuck? The issue here is that minor checks pass automatically for people who have the specific skill you just thought of already written on their character sheet, while significant checks are pretty likely to fail if you don't have the skill, and major checks are certain to fail. So the choice of what kind of skill check to call for should be based on how thoroughly you want to fuck over players who didn't successfully divine that you were going to call for a “make gobs of money” check at some crucial juncture. But they don't really go there. I suspect this is because they don't actually understand how their system works.
AncientH:

I'm not sure the writers actually understand the rules, because while their default reaction is to "make shit up" and references A Hundred Years of Solitude. I have trouble with people referencing magical realism novels in RPGs, because you've essentially got a system for some minimal amount of emulation, and the whole thing about magical realism is that it's very low-magic - no strict rules, some things just happen because thematically they're appropriate at the time. I don't mind MCs bringing in new material, or putting a new spin on existing material, but if things happen just because you're in strict magical teaparty mode.
FrankT:

There is an entire page given over to extremely specific but random sounding ritual magic items that can be called upon in short order if the MC needs a ritual component in a hurry. 42 dead wasps? Five Cheetos dipped in blood? $2.17 in pennies? Sure, why not? A few of these are, to me at least, duds. But the hit rate seems decent enough. These things sound like the kind of thing a wizened old street shaman might demand as part of a ritual to do something or other. My only real complaint here is that it's not actually in a place in the book you're going to find. Like, ever. It's on page 285 of the book, right between the expanded rules for casting tilt magic and the expanded rules for failing sanity checks. In the age of searchable pdfs, this wouldn't be a big deal, but with actual dead trees editions, reference sheets should be in places they can be referenced.
AncientH:

The dipsomancer and narco-alchemists PCs would like to have had the rules for drugs about a hundred and fifty pages ago.
FrankT:

There are rules for riots breaking out. These rules don't really make a lot of sense. Apparently using magic around mundane people causes riots? That seems like the kind of thing that should have been mentioned 288 pages earlier.

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Like, this is seriously immersion breaking. There's apparently a whole thing where magic causes people to turn into torch wielding mobs like you were playing fucking Promethean, and they don't bother to mention this until halfway through the last section of the book. What the actual fuck?
AncientH:

There's actually a half-relevant section on including aspects of the player character's daily lives in the game. They even reference the X-Files and Mulder's terrible porn habit and Scully's dog. That said, they don't actually go into detail about how players are supposed to flesh out their own characters or something, so it's relevant but not terribly useful.
FrankT:

The rules for being drunk, taking speed, and driving a car in bad terrain are all in the GM section because apparently it would be unreasonable for the players to know that drinking alcohol impairs their characters. Look, I don't fucking know, alright? Immediately after talking about the secret effects of recreational drugs it goes back to talking about effective setting narration for the GM to use. Possibly this is an elaborate ruse to fool shifty players who skipped to the end of the chapter to see if there were any rules they were missing, but I'm guessing that this part of the book looks like a ransom note or a surrealist collage is because this book has no credited editor.
AncientH:

And that's the first half of the last book. We've about maxed out my tolerance for bullshit MC advice, so it can't be too far downhill from here. As a sometime-Mister Cavern, all I can say is don't read the advice in this section. Yes, there's a few bits of prose that sound down-to-earth and wise - this is a trap.
Last edited by Ancient History on Fri Mar 07, 2014 12:56 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by fectin »

Why would you use a state-flow diagram to represent relationships?
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Post by Ancient History »

It's not a state-flow diagram, it's a relationship chart - showing how people are related, how they feel about each other. It's not exactly common, but it shows up a fair bit in certain indie RPGs, even a fair number of Call of Cthulhu 3rd-party products.
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Post by Koumei »

I think they can be fun to draw up for how the PCs feel about each other, except typically you end up needing a 3D model for it for all the lines crossing over each other.

And that's not so you keep track or anything, it's so you can show other players "And this is the mess that we call the inter-party dynamic."

Although really, you don't need that. Any time I run a con-game, I just have "One line opinions of all the other PCs" at the end of every sheet and that's good enough.
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Post by Ancient History »

Book Four: Part Two:
For the Gamemaster


Image

Music: Sublime. Yes, the entire fucking album. It's been a long week, I need to de-stress.
FrankT:

The three remaining chapters and appendices constitute 42 pages, we'll chug through them and deliver our final thoughts.
AncientH:

I've started drinking Sprite and cranberry juice. I don't actually like the taste of it, but that's what keeps me from drinking too much.

Chapter Twenty: GM Artifacts

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That's pretty sad if you've seen Roger and Me.
FrankT:

Remember how artifacts could do “pretty much anything” and players could make significant or major artifacts, but the player's section for the fucking cosmic campaign only bothered to have four lame examples of minor artifacts? This “chapter” is four fucking pages and gives examples for five significant artifacts and three major artifacts. There's nothing “GM” about this fucking chapter, it's just the final half of the ludicrously short artifacts chapter from book 3. There is literally nothing in this chapter that couldn't have been in the other chapter. And that chapter itself would have made more sense to be included in Book 1. For serious.
AncientH:

Just to underline this, one of the major possible character options in the beginning besides adept magick, thaumaturgy, and avatar magick was "have an artifact." Because if you just happened to be a dude doing construction and ran across Mjolnir, that was enough to get you into the Occult Underground.

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I could have gone a lot of different ways with this, but the short of it is that you're never going to get Thor's hammer in this game.

I could as easily have gone with the gun from Supernatural, but you get the idea: the concept that somebody stumbles across a working magical artifact of any level of power is pretty common and good material for a magic-type game at pretty much any level of play. It's easily the kind of thing that can quickly escalate into SCP-style shenanigans, and that would probably actually work in the Unknown Armies context.

What they're afraid of, of course, is D&D-style magic Christmas-tree shenanigans where "high-level" characters are loaded down with magical items to the point that most aspiring archmages in D&D3 had more occult gewgaws than Dr. Strange.

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C'mon, it was the '90s.

So in Unknown Armies, not only is character advancement painfully slow and unrewarding, but magic items are rare and basically fuck-you Mister Cavern Eyes Only.
FrankT:


The actual magic items are pretty underwhelming. The primary power of the tape of the naked goddess is to make you want it. It's the kind of thing that gets used as a toss-off joke in Oglaf [NSFW], but here we're supposed to accept it as being one of the most important objects in the entire history of the world. We've been getting hints about this fucking thing since the intro fiction of the book, and it's supposed to be one of the central objects of the campaign world. It's just so... small that it makes the rest of the setting small.

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This trick is actually better than like half the shitty magic items in this game.

The other items aren't really any better. You have a magic key that can open a limited number of locks if and only if you haven't checked to see if the lock in question is currently locked. You have a magical Jesus Fish car
decal that gives you a situational bonus to your drive skill (note that characters in this game do not normally have a “drive” skill). You have a magic book that causes the reader to be weakly possessed by one eighth of a demon. It's all very small and bullshit.
AncientH:

The Hand of Glory is pretty much exactly what it says on the tin.
Image
Not even the cool version
The astral camera is...uh...

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Yeah.

The astral camera actually pisses me off quite a bit because in all this talk about "the Afterlife" part of cosmology, very little of the wordcount has actually gone into describing the astral plane, like how to get there, what it looks like, why you fucking care, etcetra. It's very annoying that one of the few significant magick items they fucking bother to stat out involves a part of the game that few people are going to muck about with because they might honestly have no clue it exists.

The major artifacts also include the "magic bullet" that killed JFK, which has been turned into an amulet with a straight +30% mod to shooting an unsuspecting target, and "the warstone" which is supposedly a rock that was the first murder weapon and instills violence. Whoo.

Chapter Twenty-One: The Unnatural

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Wait. I don't think that's what they meant.
FrankT:

Unnatural Phenomena are this game's Paradox, another place where you can clearly see the game's Mage: the Ascension DNA prominently on display. When an Adept uses their Magick, there is a chance of something weird happening around them. Like paradox in Mage, they aren't necessarily bad and they are usually pretty obviously magic, so it seems like it would make things even easier for the Mak Attaxer to succeed at their goal of convincing people that magic is a thing. What's really weird is that the book is almost fucking over and they are only now mentioning that this happens, when it would be fucking obvious to anyone who had any of the powers from chapter 2 that this is how shit goes down. I could put up a picture of Slowpoke here, but I've already done it for the first part of this book and if I just put Slowpoke pictures every time it was relevant for this fucking book I'd just be spamming pink psychic pokemon all over the fucking place.
AncientH:

Back in SCP-territory, really. Most of these "unnatural phenomena" are just old hex signs and crap though - cold spots, milk spoiling, missing time, minor poltergeist activity, technology malfunctions...and, amazingly, this shit is supposed to occur on a random but probably semi-regular basis depending on the number and type of magick going on nearby. To the point where if your cabal has a clubhouse, there's a good chance that people and objects are going to die/get erased from existence every couple of years, just from proximity.
FrankT:

One of the major unnatural phenomenons that can occur is for a haunting to start. That's when a dead person's soul.... wait a minute! Dead peoples' souls are demons in this fucking setting. That's what a demon fucking is. This actually gives us a page citation to five pages later in the chapter where it explains that only some of the dead souls are demons, and the others are “revenants” instead. Fucking fuck! We are on page 305 of a 335 page book and we already had the section where they supposedly give the fucking game master the lowdown on the afterlife, and now we've decided to split hairs about what types and flavors of unliving souls the setting supports? Fuck this book.

Image
AncientH:

It's worse than that, because they actually talk about ghosts and souls and crap in the earlier chapters, and we still have no idea what the fuck the Cruel Ones are.

We do get some monsters, because I was going to prepare a rant about how this was a game where humans were the monsters, and then I remembered there are lycanthropes and golems and shit. Some of the better monsters remind me of Doubt - for example, the Entropics are hypothetical intangible entities that fuck with your memories to try and get you to kill yourself, and Nonentities are literal soulless human beings ("every big city has about a dozen") shat out by reality who may or may not become emotion junkies; Tenebrae are "mystical scavengers of the unloved dead" and guard unclaimed corpses; Unspeakable Servants are like a cross between homunculi and tentacle monsters.

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Ladies.
FrankT:

The actual monsters are in under “the unnatural” most of these were in fact not mentioned at all earlier in the book. Also, they aren't really usable as-is. You don't get a plug-n-play Astral Parasite, you get a stat range. And then you get to make up your own skills I guess. It's not just that all this ranting about golems and werewolves and ghouls and shit is totally left field, it's that these rules aren't even complete. It's like a
sketch of a monster manual that you might have if you were going to design a system and create some monsters.

Chapter Twenty Two: The Unexplained

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AncientH:

This feels like another chapter that should have just been part of the last chapter. It's basically a bunch of early-90s X-Files fodder duded up for Unknown Armies. Cattle mutilations, spontaneous combustion, psychics, vampires, UFOs, all that crappola that keeps the National Enquirer busy and keeps Kolchak in pork-pie hats.
FrankT:

You'd think that considering how much of the book is “unexplained” in the classic sense, that they could have just written “This book. We haven't explained shit in this book and we're not going to. Also, go fuck yourself.” And that would have been basically the same as what they actually did. This chapter is five pages long and is just a rant about how most weird shit has a perfectly natural explanation. Everything from swamp gas to fireflies can create strange lights in the sky that don't leave radar shadows, and sometimes cattle are mutilated by bored teenagers. Unknown Armies insists that there is no grand unified conspiracy and that most crazy seeming shit is unrelated to the magickal war you're supposed to care about. This book suggests that the gamemaster troll the players with National Enquirer bullshit, but this hardly stands out in the face of all the other trolling that the book does for the players. But it does bring the question back to the fore: “What are we supposed to do in this fucking game?” This chapter contains no answers.
AncientH:

Vampires, for example, are the result of severe inbreeding in Transylvania, resulting in a bunch of deformed, anemic nobles with a taste for red meat and severely retarded aging.

That's it. There's no ideas for using vampires in your game, and they have nothing whatsoever to do with magick, and there are no rules for playing one (or, if you choose to look at it that way, no rule against not playing one). The rest of these entries are pretty much the same.
FrankT:

The final chapter ends with the revelation “Elvis: He's dead.” Basically, this book is deeply disrespectful to its readers, and this chapter is just a half assed middle finger as it walks away.
AncientH:

Image
This is an actual front page from the National Enquirer. It is a more useful resource for coming up with crazy shit for your game. Seriously, if Dick Cheney was a robot, then somebody built him, and that was probably a crazy and powerful clockwork adept - and hell, it would explain why he's a soulless abomination, though it makes you wonder who really fathered his kids. The thing is, Cheney was in a position of power and influence - what did his magickal mistress use him to influence while he was in the White House? What strange favors did they broker? And now that he's out of it, what is to become of him.

Scenario: Bill in Three Persons

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FrankT:

Not labeled as a chapter as such, this is a 12 page mini-adventure. This and the nine page minier-mini-adventure are this book's last chance to explain what the fuck players are supposed to do in this fucking game.
AncientH:

Like a microcosm of the game itself, there is no indication as to why the player characters should give a fuck or get involved in this scenario in any way.
FrankT:

The actual adventure is a story about a dude who splits into three people at a crossroads and leads three different kind of lame lives in different parts of the country and then all run their cars into each other in the road.
The players all get teleported to the accident site from wherever they happen to have been by a fake sheriff who is really an all powerful immortal NPC. Then the players rescue the three men, find out they are all the same men, the car crash explodes, and all the players are teleported to a supermarket in the past. Yes. Really. Look, this isn't finely crafted storytelling, OK? If I was inclined to be generous, I would say that this adventure was the result of someone writing down what they could remember of a dream they had. It doesn't hold together into any kind of in-world narrative, it's a surrealist jumble of scenes.
AncientH:

It also has nothing to do with magick as described in this book. It doesn't really involve the occult underground, or even introduce the PCs to the occult underground. You could be a dentist with a ouija board and suddenly the cosmos chooses you to sort out some hypertime shit. Have fun.

The only thing really magickal about this adventure is an artifact that Bill #1 happens to be wearing (the PCs would be perfectly in their rights to kill him and take it from his still-warm corpse...that is, if they could tell it was magickal), Bill #2 is an epidermomancer, and Bill #3 is an avatar of the Fool. There's also a sub-plot with a child molester/illegal handgun merchant and Bill #2's illegitimate four-year-old daughter, heavy with Tarantino references.
FrankT:

I think the primary problem with this adventure is that the player characters don't have any ability to interact with temporal paradoxes. They can't detect them, they can't follow them, they can't control them, they can't unravel them. Fucking nothing. All of this operates on magical teaparty and MC fiat. There aren't even any rules for temporal mechanics in this fucking game, and the guy who is throwing them through time and space isn't using an in-game ability. None of this makes any sense or ties into the actual setting in any way.

I don't understand how the players are supposed to “solve” it, because the internal logic of what you're supposed to do to save the time stream doesn't make any sense. You're supposed to keep each Bill from escaping from the cops, but I don't see how that is supposed to make anything better since now there will be three identical dudes going to possibly the same jail. And that really doesn't seem like it's any better or less paradoxical than having three identical dudes going to the same hospital.
AncientH:

The general atmosphere of this adventure is probably supposed to be very Twilight Zone-ish, but again this isn't the Twilight Zone game. Getting pulled in by invisible forces is fine if that is what the game is about - just like in a Sliders RPG you expect to travel to a different world every week - but what the fuck do you do if you're a videomancer and every time they pull you in to sort this shit out you miss your show? What if you're a dipsomancer - do you just ask where the nearest bar is and try to see if drunk logic works better on timey-wimey balls? If you're an avatar of the Executioner, do you just ask people for permission to kill 2 out of the 3 Bills and sort shit out that way? NO ONE KNOWS.

Scenario: Pinfeathers

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Screw you Yuri Gagarin!
AncientH:

This is not a scenario that involves the PCs, much as Last Man Standing/Yojimbo is not about the titular unnamed character. A situation is set up with different factions and players, and then the PCs wander in and have the option to fuck it all up...or, y'know, not. There's never any real reason for them to get involved.
FrankT:

This really isn't so much an adventure as “some characters.” There are some bird-themed neo-pagans, some artifact owned by Amelia Earhart, and some people with avatar powers who want to kill each other. The players are supposed to ____ and get involved because of _____. Those are left intentionally blank because the author doesn't actually know or particularly care about such nitty gritty details as “who are the antagonists” or “what the plot hooks are” or any of that modernist malarky. I don't really know what this is for, and I honestly don't even really care.
AncientH:

There's not a lot to help Mister Cavern out here. If one of the PCs is an avatar of the Flying Woman they might have something to gain, but otherwise you're dealing with two hostile avatars and a group of mildly confused neopagans that probably just want to get skyclad and drunk, more or less in that order.
Image
I'm not censoring this, it's on the gods-be-damned Wikipedia page. But it is big as fuck, so I'm spoilering it.
FrankT:

Unknown Armies wrote:Now that you've settled on personality types for the main GMCs
Yeeeah. Even calling it “some characters” is probably giving it too much credit. The characters in it don't have their personalities or motivations completed, and the MC is just supposed to make some shit up. Honestly, I don't know why this scenario is even here. It's not even remotely close to being in a playable state.
AncientH:

Also, the "minor artifact" in this adventure actually gives you better powers than any of the major artifacts in the GM chapter, since it gives you the equivalent abilities of an Avatar (Flying Woman) 50% and no plane you're on will ever crash and it works like fucking Jack's magick compass.

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Which direction to get laid?

Final Thoughts
FrankT:

Unknown Armies got way too much credit back in the late nineties. The game leaned heavily on deepisms and mystery to convince people that there was something hidden beneath the outer layers, that if you just delved a little deeper or read a little farther you'd get a big payoff. But it just wasn't there. The end of the day there actually aren't any deep secrets or grand revelations. It's all cock tease and no ball fondling. With the benefit of hindsight we can say definitively that there was no second shoe, there was never going to be a second shoe, and the whole thing looked like an incomplete mess because it's an incomplete mess and not because you just haven't studied it hard enough.

In 1998, I can certainly see how someone could decide that their Call of Cthulhu house rules were a better rule set than Storyteller table top. So I could definitely see how someone could say “Let's play Mage: the Ascension ported to my Call of Cthulhu house rules.” But while I can see how someone would think that was a good idea, it is not in fact a particularly good idea. Call of Cthulhu is also a terrible system, and the way forward into the 21st century was to make a better system, not to endlessly fiddle with systems recognized as bad during the Carter administration.
AncientH:

I'll go so far as to say that no-one has ever played a game of Unknown Armies as written; even character creation would just be an exercise in endless frustration unless you broken the written rules and read parts of the book you were never meant to. That said, you can see why there has been some deep and abiding interest in this game for years - if you ignore the bullshit "adepts are retarded" stuff in the GM section, the bare-bones system is better than Mage in some respects and the setting material, scant as it is, is more interesting. But the system is still so badly worked, and the approach to playing and gamemastering so pretentious, and the setting material for the occult underground that's supposed to be the crux of the game so lacking that the game is fucking crippled before it even gets out the door.

What I really wanted to see is, I guess, a solid setting - pick a city like London, or Boston, or Seattle, or Atlanta, or anywhere, and just flesh out how the occult underground works in that place, who the local cabals and notable dukes are, who supplies what, etc. I want to know which bars the demonbreakers and hellblazers drink at before the red line to the bishop's office rings and they put their collars back on and take a traveler for the road. I want to know who to talk to when you need a pint of baby's blood, and how much to tip the guy at the morgue to go take a smoke break and not ask any questions. I want, if not a full catalogue of the arsenal of darkness and a hierarchy of hell, than the names and personalities and abilities of some of the most common demons or other unnatural entities hanging out and surviving. I don't want sixty pages of occult history, but I want to know that there's enough occult history to fill sixty pages if I want it.

And yeah, I want to be able to play a character that has a reasonable chance at succeeding at at least one or two given tasks.
FrankT:

I think that something kind of interesting could have been done with their Adept magic. It had definite problems over and above the failtastic system – I think I may have touched a bit on how outright offensive the sex magic system was, and while I feel it was the worst there were considerable problems with most of them. But it was gonzo, it was different, and with some editorial control and some development and a better core mechanic it maybe could have gone somewhere. But the authors were uninterested in even trying. They ran off to do their stupid avatar war, and that I don't think was ever salvageable. The whole “there can only be one” thing the god walkers had going for them was inherently incompatible with cooperative storytelling as a genre. So focusing in on that as the high end of the campaign doomed the whole project before we even got into shit like “don't make a roll under system” or “don't penalize skill defaulting in a system without a fixed skill list, for fuck's sake.”
AncientH:

There were six supplements for this game in the first edition; two were books of scenarios, two were nominal faction splatbooks (for Sleepers and the New Inquisition), and one each that introduced new adept schools (Posthuman Magick) and avatars (Statosphere). Opinion on these products is generally more critical; the new adept schools in particular are considered to have missed out on the crucial "paradox" that defined the schools in this book. A lot of the material and miscellaneous rules for those 1st-edition books was folded into this 2nd edition book, which might partially explain some of the weird organization in this book. Maybe. More than that though, there were articles for Unknown Armies in indie gaming mags like Pyramid, which is where I first heard of it.

In the end though, Unknown Armies is not exactly an influential game. The mechanics, at least, are so bare-bones and generic that it's hard to steal from them, and the whole minor/significant/major charge stuff hasn't blatantly popped up anywhere else that I can see. The setting material - including adepts and avatars - is ultimately too derivative to really make the leap into inspiring other games, at least so far as I can see. So if no one really took the mechanics and ran with them, and nobody took the magick ideas and ran with them, and there's not really enough setting to steal...what's left?

Attitude, as far as I can judge. Unknown Armies is the quintessential "I can do better" game. There are still people that consider Unknown Armies cool, they set up campaigns and shit around it. But I consider it a half-baked game, one that could have been a lot better than it was if the writers had only tried harder and been a little less full of themselves. It's a game that cries out for a rewrite in many cases - simplified and reconfigured dice mechanic, integrated character generation, an emphasis on the setting of the occult underground, less high-minded bullshit and obtuse advice for Mister Cavern and more raw material to work with. I fully believe that there's a market for a gritty, grimy postmodern magic game set in the occult underground. I also believe this book doesn't deliver to that market.
Last edited by Ancient History on Fri Mar 07, 2014 9:57 pm, edited 2 times in total.
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Post by Ancient History »

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Post by Grek »

Small Correction: World Weekly News and the National Enquirer are different publications.
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Post by Darth Rabbitt »

Grek wrote:Small Correction: World Weekly News and the National Enquirer are different publications.
I was going to say the same thing.
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Post by Red_Rob »

Great OSSR. I really wanted to like Unknown Armies, but ultimately it seems like better material for a series of short stories than an RPG. I think the fiction and ambience are what hooks so many people about this game, and in a way I guess if you are inspired by that kind of tone it might help you run a cool game. Of course, the fact it offers almost no guidance on what the hell is actually supposed to happen in such a game is a real let down.
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Post by Username17 »

The whole thing with flop rolls could have been used to sow some real confusion among the players. With two or more dice being rolled and it sometimes being up to the MC to decide which dice are used as the ones and tens place, there could have been legitimate ambiguity as to whether players' abilities were working correctly (or at all). It could have been used for some real doubt.

Unfortunately, even the benefits of that kind of gimmick is lost. While there is some dice fuckery, it's all totally above board. When you roll four d10s it's not because you don't know what's going on - it's because you had to spend some time math hammering your skill and found out that your chance of success was maximized when you rolled four dice. When the MC decides what your 10s and 1s places are, it's not because there are abilities in play you don't know about, it's because you've already failed to assemble a success and now it's just up to the MC to decide how much to fuck you.

Honestly, percentile dice with potential flops look like a kind of neat resolution for Doubt. But it wouldn't work at all like it does in this game.

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Post by Koumei »

I've found that flip-flopping results works best for generating crap from random tables: unless you rolled a multiple of 11, or precisely 0 (or 100, whatever), it means you effectively rolled up two things and get to select the least stupid. Or, depending on the game, the most stupid. This is especially important in things like Maid, which has a whole heap of "Random X occurs" which all use a d66 (so to speak). And which can give you a character who is both a vampire and also a robot - if you see that as a bug, you flip-flop to avoid it. If you see it as a feature, you don't.
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Ancient History
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Post by Ancient History »

Yeah, wild mages could have some fun with that.
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Post by Blicero »

FrankTrollman wrote:The whole thing with flop rolls could have been used to sow some real confusion among the players. With two or more dice being rolled and it sometimes being up to the MC to decide which dice are used as the ones and tens place, there could have been legitimate ambiguity as to whether players' abilities were working correctly (or at all). It could have been used for some real doubt.

Unfortunately, even the benefits of that kind of gimmick is lost. While there is some dice fuckery, it's all totally above board. When you roll four d10s it's not because you don't know what's going on - it's because you had to spend some time math hammering your skill and found out that your chance of success was maximized when you rolled four dice. When the MC decides what your 10s and 1s places are, it's not because there are abilities in play you don't know about, it's because you've already failed to assemble a success and now it's just up to the MC to decide how much to fuck you.

Honestly, percentile dice with potential flops look like a kind of neat resolution for Doubt. But it wouldn't work at all like it does in this game.

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I don't quite get what you're saying here. Are you saying that the basic task resolution system would be for characters to roll xd10? And then the MC would look at the results and select one die to be the tens place and one die to be the ones place? Or would the players be given that choice, and, sporadically, the MC gets to choose?
Out beyond the hull, mucoid strings of non-baryonic matter streamed past like Christ's blood in the firmament.
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Post by name_here »

The idea would be that the DM would pick and then not tell the players what he picked so they wouldn't know if they failed because they rolled low or because the target number is really high or because they can't use that ability anymore if they could in the first place. Probably if you're not trying to invoke your supernatural powers you'd get to pick.

See, the core conceit of Doubt is that neither the players nor their characters know for sure what superpowers they have or how they work.
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Post by TheFlatline »

Ancient History wrote:My basic take on tilting is that it's sort of meant for, y'know, the coolers that casinos bring in when a particular table is running "hot" and they're losing money. And I could totally see an interesting game where you've got an occult subtext to poker.

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Oh wait, Tim Powers wrote that novel.
Thread resurrection, but I was reading this and I confess. I straight up ripped the plot of Last Call and inserted it into my Warhammer 40k Dark Heresy mega campaign that I ran as a massive sandbox investigation. I even cribbed the rules for Assumption and renamed it Ascension. The high moment of the campaign ended up being a straight up game of poker for the Emperor's soul. Okay the end of the game mutated completely away from where I originally intended it but I was okay with this.

The metaphysics... well, honestly? They blended perfectly. Tarot became the emperor's tarot, I rewrote the entire major and minor arcanoi to reflect 40k's ethics and mysticism (which made the point where the Tarot actually start predicting what the story was about to do kind of awesome with players sorting through fragments of interpretations trying to piece together what the Tarot was telling them), I even had a psyker who played the Yoda/wise old wizard role to show them the whole archetype thing when he managed to go from party member to Jungian archetype (I ripped a bit here from the Illuminatus! Trilogy to make things fun). I had extremely hardcore 40k fanboys (I mean, we're talking people who probably have read most if not all of the Black Library collection) in the game and none of them ever even expressed an iota of criticism about the places I took the cosmology of that game. It's been a few years since I ended that game and it's still referenced as being one of the high points of everyone's gaming experiences.

Thank you Tim Powers, for being a freaky creative motherfucker.

I encourage reading it (Drawing of the Dark was pretty awesome too). It also makes for a great starting point for a metaphysical cosmology.
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JigokuBosatsu
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Post by JigokuBosatsu »

Blargh, now all I want is my Foucault's Pendulum/"SCP Foundation" TTRPG.

Side note... what's the proper style for the name of a collaborative horror fiction project on the web? I'm going with quotes, because fuck you.
Omegonthesane wrote:a glass armonica which causes a target city to have horrific nightmares that prevent sleep
JigokuBosatsu wrote:so a regular glass armonica?
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Post by Kemper Boyd »

I have to say, I've been playing Unknown Armies for something like 14 years now and lots of those issues that the review mentions have never cropped up at all in my games.
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