[simon]

I’m hoping to get an Unknown armies campaign started sometime this year. In contrast with the über dark, complex and fiddly Orpheus campaign I’ve got planned, it’s pretty light and surreal. It’s described as a game of personal power and consequence - what that means is it’s a world inhabited by people who stumble across magic, either through being in the wong place at the wrong time or by obsessively following a mundane pashion until it begins to unlock reality to the person in weird and wonderful ways. It’s also been described as a darker Over The Edge, and Quentin Tarrinto’s Call of Cthulhu...

The game has three ‘settings’ - that is, you can play it at a pretty mundane level, or you can whack it up to 11 and go for full-blown weirdness. The most basic is Street Level - characters are humans who have no real experience of the supernatural, unless unconsiously tapping into one of the worlds many archetypes. You’re Joe Normal. Next level up is Global’ Level. Your’e Joe Somebody, but you’re not the only magic user on the block. Chances are you’re an adept in some sort of magic practice, or you’re consiously atuning yourself to an archetype, becoming an avatar in the process. You’re part of the occult underground, making grabs for more power, but not really aware of the bigger picture beyond the limits of your obsessions and experiences, the names of the big movers and shakers, both individuals and strange sects. Finally you’ve got the Cosmic Level, where you’re one of the planet’s most powerful individuals, and have some real idea of how this magic ting works, plus all manner of other mysteries - how to create rituals, what the hell the universal archetypes are, what a demon is...  

Just as a quick example of what the game is like, here’s a quick run down on three of the bigger groups in the Occult Underground (the only three to have their own sourcebooks:

The New Inquisition are just like the Old Inquisition, except that they're funded by a mad billionaire with divine ambitions. They dress in raincoats and surgical masks, and they shoot rather a lot of folk rather than preaching at them in Latin. Tend to go after any piece of magical merchadise that turns up. The group most focussed on power for power’s sake.

The Sleepers are the bedtime-story bogeymen of the occult underground. They keep the existence of magick a secret from the mundane world, lest the sleeping tiger wake and devour us all. If you make too much unnatural noise, if you leave witnesses to your workings, or if you just can't shut your pie hole about how you can melt your face on command, the Sleepers will come for you in the deeps of night and tell it you straight: hush hush, little mage, for dead men cast no spells.

The bizarre occult conspiracy known as Mak Attax wants to upsize your soul, one fast-food burger at a time, until we all go dancing out the doorways of the luminous clown's thousands of mystically aligned restaurants and into a bold new future of magickal enlightenment. The rest of the occult underground thinks they're either complete losers or the most dangerous threat the world has ever faced. But no matter what the Maks hang tough, wash their hands regularly, and serve up a value meal of mojo their way.

I’ve got a whole bunch of scenarios to thread together into a campaign, including a long road-trip of an ending, which ties into the only adventure I’ve actually run, a one shot adventure where a terrorist attempted to ascend to a higher plane by crashng a mystically attuned plane into Chicago, ‘the heart of America’ and broadcasting his attack on live TV. As such, the history of this world has a bizarre terrorist attack burnt into the minds of most of the TV watching world. Particularly since the scenario describes how the story of the heroes upon Flight 333 would be made into a TV film.

Incidentally, this scenario was published before the millenium. In the Unknown Armies world it therefore pre-dates the genuine events of September 11 2001, although the players actually averted the disaster. Figuratively it heralds a new age of terrorism (although this isn’t a subject really focussed on by the game) and weirdness (which is). The default start for a campaign will therefore be just before the turn of the millenium, 1999.

Anyone interested?

[metagaia]

I'd be quite interested in this one once Paz's D&D campaign is finished.     If not then I'm happy enough to play Cthulhu instead.

The Mak Attax organisation sounds particularly cool    

[simon]

I'll admit up-front this is the one game I really want to run a campaign for, so I'm happy for this to sit at the side for a while until I can get more people interested. Although there are a handful of good one-shot adventures available for the game, I don't think they really explore the ideas this game has in them - with magic being about the pursuit of obsessions it lends itself to a longer story-arc. It's a game with a clever approach to magic with a pretty simple percentile system for resolving tasks, which encourages players to develop their characters.

I'd prefer to start a campaign at 'street-level' to develop the characters and let them evolve a bit rather than just conjure up a bunch of fully trained magic-users (if you excuse the pun). There's an introductory scenario in the core book 'Bill In Three Persons', where a bunch of strangers stumble upon a car crash, and their first experience of the weirdness this game is about. There's a number of one-shot adventures that can be run just as well, most with pre-generated characters (but which can be replaced by player-created alternatives):

• Jailbreak - requires a whole bunch of players, to play both the jail-breakers and their hostages... (pre-gens)

• Joy and Sorrow - inhabitants of the same street (and members of the local housing commitee) are visited by mysterious and threatening strangers... (pre-gens)

• And I Feel Fine - inhabitants of a caravan park find everyone in the surrounding countryside mysteriously 'vanished'... (pre-gens)

• Fall of a Sparrow - a small end-of-the-world cult, together for the millenium, are well and truly screwed... (pre-gens)

• Kind Hearts and Coronets - paramedics and ambulance crew in New Orleans around Mardi Gras witness the death of a major occult figure... (pre-gens)

• Carcosa, NJ - Semi-occult-aware gang of criminals attempt to find a missing person, in order to write off a debt... (pre-gens)

• A Few Of My Favorite Things - the PCs randomly stumble into the American subconsious whilst walking through the city at night...

• Green Glass Grail - PCs investigating rumours of a 'phantom' and a holy grail in the form of a Coca Cola Bottle...

• Stoon Lake - PCs try to uncover the truth about local Bigfoot rumours...

• Garden Full of Weeds - almost a mini-campaign in itself, the adventure is set in a housing estate that's become, somehow, corrupt - PCs could simply be neighbours or friends that live there...

A Few Of My Favorite Things is probably a simple if surreal introduction, whilst Bill In Three Persons, Kind Hearts and Coronets and Green Glass Grail will probably introduce you to key figures/concepts early on.

I'm not likely to start running this for a while, but if anything intrigues people, I can elaborate, or go into more detail about the sorts of characters you can play.

[simon]

Might be able to run this as an online 'game' for awhile, if anyone's interested. Running a thread where players interact In Character as if reporting strange goings-on to each other on an online forum (and then PMing me when they want their characters to go off and chase up some of the weird rumours and theories they or other people have mentioned)...

This online version would essentially be freeform - you'd write the stories and I'd make sure they fit into the Unknown Armies cosmology, and let you know the results of your interactions with them. Probably without stats, but I could use the core 4 attributes (Body, Speed, mind and Soul) if people preferred to know how 'good' their characters were at doing things.

There wouldn't be 'turns' as such - players would post in 'real time' as and when they want. There's no winning condition, essentially you're 'poking around' and experiencing the weirdness. Although avoiding death is always a bonus, as is finding the potential to weild real power.

Anyone interested/intrigued?

[metagaia]

I've never tried this type of forum thing before, but I must admit I am quite interested.  It would probably speed the game up when it actually got started F2F since everybody would have a handle of their character.

What the hell, I'm in.

[simon]

It's a little experimental, to be fair.

It's mixing elements of a play-by-mail game called De Profundis, where players correspond to each other about Cthulhoid mysteries (see review HERE) and the online Hunternet that accompanied White Wolf's Hunter: the Reckoning (where a nice little IC community built up around the premise of people discovering they had developed the abilities to see the monsters that lurked in the shadows and manipulated mankind, and had the power to strike back).

I'm thinking the premise with this Unknown Armies 'game' will be that the characters all knew each other when younger, and still keep in contact. They got involved in a drunken prank or game (for example, playing with a ouija board), and 'something happened'. Now, recently, the characters have each received a package, with a note reminding them of the date when the event happened.

What happened on that night is up to the character to explain via their online discussion. What they receive in their packages is up to the individual to reveal. If they PM me to say that they want to pursue certain avenues of investigation, I'll PM them back with the results, allowing them to bring new information to the discussion. And so on.

I'll open an Unknown Armies forum when enough people are interested, and start a new thread, which will essentially represent either a forum the characters are active on, or a group email.