Unknown Armies General

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>>52701947
I'm glad I've got enough of a group to throw a game together. The best part is, none of them know what it is, so they'll be going in blind. Time to rev up those feelings of incompetence and doubt I remember from the last time I GM'd!

A few houserules I've got in mind, and maybe people here can give feedback or suggest more:
>in combat, declaration order is explicitly lowest Notice -> highest Notice, including identities that substitute
>you may Dodge a specific target instead of generally dodging, in which case you get double the benefit but only against that one target's attacks

There's also a few adjustments I did to bring some of the Avatars in Statosphere up to date, which I decided to do after reading the Healer in book 5 and thinking it was really, really dull.

>>52702081
What's your premise?

>initiative
eh, you could have it be strict, but I figured the idea behind keeping it generally freeform is to help for more organic/dramatic sequences.
Having that Dodge option does make sense though, since you can't be keeping your eyes on everyone in a fight.

>>52702122
I've got a small intro session planned (in rough: party knows each other, are occult virgins, walk into an Otherspace containing a particularly antisocial adept and assorted other things, have to find a way out and figure out what the fuck's going on, there's a bunch of endstates that could manage both of those), and then I'll do the group setting-building after that. Other than that, give the players some advice on how to make characters that would be the sort to delve into the Underground, and make sure they follow through on it. The Objectives system has helped me out a lot in the few other sessions of 3e I've run, and my players are good enough that I can trust them to buy in. I realize now that that's just a really wordy "I'll figure it out later" reading it back now, but I think it's probably the best way to do things with new players.

I understand where the goals of having the loose initiative are, and I'll definitely work to keep it as fast, but I'm the sort of person who likes structure, and it feels more fair having something everyone can agree on determining the order.

kidnap random people off the street, make them learn how to play UA.
actually that could be a good UA conspiracy...

Luckily i'm in a good group and game right now, besides one flaking in the middle.

That said, i do want to run this eventually with some other people i know, but i don't know if they can do something so story-heavy.

One idea i have is sort of a mix of Fargo and Silent Hill where the game is set in a fictional area that doesn't seem to exist in any official maps outside of the area, and it's filled with all sorts of shenanigans.

Looking at the long game i could say that there could be multiple storylines within the area set in different eras and even styles, League of Extraordinary Gentlemen style.

I haven't figured out any specifics though since i'm intentionally keeping myself away from the books for the sake of my GM, who wants to introduce us to cool shit.

>>52704355
I'm picturing something like Saw, but instead of forcing people to chop of limbs or choose which person in a room dies, they're all forced to sit down and play some card game with rules that seem completely arbitrary, and if they get the rules wrong, they get some magickal feedback.

That sounds like a pretty fun idea to throw in, somewhere. Maybe there's a demon who was some kind of cartomancer in life, and will do you any one favor if you win, but screwing up means you get a minor blast, and if you lose or are knocked out, he takes control of your body.

>>52704374
Sounds a lot like Twin Peaks to me. I've been running a road game set currently in Kansas City Missouri; they're trying to get out of town courtesy of a Viaturgist trucker, but they had to bust his rig out of an impound lot owned by a Lost-Causer Cliomancer. Good times so far. Later I'm planning to have a Phobomancer and a Chronophagist show up, as well as using Rome and Carthage from Post-Modern Magick.

I'm really on the fence about UA3. On one hand the new rules are nice and some of the new magick schools and archetypes are cool and there is a good amount of advice on how to actually run the game that was lacking in 2e, but the art direction is fucking horrible and a lot of the new fluff doesn't seem as interesting as what was in the older editions. Also no fiction that gives a sense of a larger "plot" to the setting besides the stuff about the girl in Cincinnati and all of the new rumors in the third book aren't very good.

I still think that if I were trying to get new players into UA I'd use 2e.

>>52704903
>no sense of a larger plot

so did you miss the entire thing about the Comte and The Freak entering the House of Renunciation and how they're warring for the future of existence

or the schism among the Naked Goddess cult for that matter

also GNOMON is more interesting than anything in 2e

>>52704903
>art direction
I love the new edition, but I'm 100% with you on that. I get what they were trying to do, but it fell flat compared to 2e's nice, more classic-looking style. That even goes for the cover, it's got nice details and all, but the old cover's got atmosphere 3e doesn't match. But hey, I like Ironclaw, which should tell you how much art direction affects my opinions of things.

>>52705114
The thing about the Comte is my least favorite part of 3e, and I think about it with the fury of at least 3 suns. I've justified it to myself by having it be that this happens every cycle, where one person replaces the Comte and then, once the old one dies, they ascend to replace them and complete the cycle. So the old Comte did this before, to someone who did this before, to [...]. The experience and knowledge comes after their dip in the Statosphere between the end and the beginning.

GNOMON is cool, though.

>>52705114
Yeah, that's all stuff that's detailed in the setting info sections of the book, I'm talking about the fiction that was scattered around throughout the old books, all the stuff with Renata and Dermott that ended up coming back in To Go, the story about the TNI team that got told over the course of Lawyers Guns and Money and the Mak Attax book, the Witness stories from the 2e book. They've released three books so far and only one of them has anything like that.

And GNOMON is fine but it feels more like something that would show up in Delta Green.

>>52705268
>I get what they were trying to do, but it fell flat compared to 2e's nice, more classic-looking style.
Yeah, like the art in 2e wasn't great but it at least made it look like UA was a gritty game where weird shit happens. Most of the stuff in 3e makes it look like UA is a game about people in bad costumes standing around.

2e art looked like it was illustrating characters in UA, 3e art looks like it's illustrating people who play UA.

There's talk of a ritual called "Raise the White Dragon". See, medieval literature is filled with imagery of dragons swooping down from the heavens in fire and brimestone to terrorize and spread carnage, isn't it? Well, what has a broad wingspread and makes illiterate farmers run screaming from the hills in faraway lands when it shows up roaring from the sky? That's right: a USAF MQ-1 Predator drone.

As far as rituals go, this one's got pretty mild requirements. The only problem is that the main ingredient, that is to say, the drone itself, is a tad bit hard to get. The US Air Force isn't particularly keen on lending its flying death machines to random weirdoes as is, and while there've reportedly been some attempts to steal one from the Yemenites in the chaos of the recent civil war most agree the ritual only works with an American one.
Once you've gotten your drone - how exactly shall be left as an exercise for the reader's imagination - the steps are fairly simple. Make ink by mixing ashes, crude oil and human tears. You only need about a spoonful of tears but the ashes must have been collected from the still smoldering ruins of a building that was at least at one point used as a dwelling. Now, using a quill made from a falcon's feather (species is irrelevant), use the ink to inscribe the 105th Shura (Al-Fil) of the Quran, in Arabic, on the body of the drone 100 times. This must be done in one go, without eating or drinking, and for a full month before starting you must not have eaten anything that wouldn't pass by a Halal inspector.

(cont.)

>>52705810
Drain all the gasoline out of the tank. Sell to someone, it doesn't matter. Replace it with goat's blood. Now you're all set and ready, although if you really want to go through with it there's technically a final, optional step you could try: pry open the bomb bay, and fill it with the waste of American society. What you use exactly doesn't matter but it has to be unmistakably American, so of course junk food is said to work best. Something like a combination of aerosol cheese cans, Shake Shack burger wrappers and Coke bottles should do the trick.
Fall asleep while chanting the Shura. If you've done everything right, you will find that your sleeping consciousness has possessed the drone, which now flies on goat's blood (thankfully, as efficiently as it does on fuel) under your control, surrounded by a funky halo of ghostly white flame which someone's bound to mistake for a UFO. This is a Rank-5 Self check and a Rank-5 Unnatural check right there, but whether or not you succeed you do get yourself a shiny new Drone Possession skill at 15%, which you can increase normally if you're thinking of making a habit of drone bombing your enemies.
(cont.)

>>52705810
A little Predator trivia for you laypeople: the MQ-1 Predator drone has a cruising speed of 130-165 km/h and a maximum speed of 217 km/h. It can fly for 1,100 km on a full tank and has a service ceiling of 7,620 meters. In other words, it's basically faster, higher up and can travel further than most anything any of your saner enemies might be running away from it in. It's got a camera on it with nightvision, thermal vision, all the good stuff you can now use to spy on the poor bastards. It doesn't have any countermeasures and a single missile will drop it, but hey, what are the odds they've got something like that in their pockets, eh?
If voyeurism alone isn't your thing, here's the real icing on the cake: all that garbage you put in the bomb bay? Well, the moment your monster took off, it transformed into a pair of AGM-114 Hellfire smart missiles. 8 km operational range, 450 m/s of laser guided, bunker busting death. Fire with your Done Possession skill. You hit anything, it's vaporized. Half the block around it probably is, the building it was in definitely is. Don't even bother rolling for damage. Holy shit, what are you doing with your life? Roll a Rank-7 Violence check, you maniac.
Enjoy being hunted down by the Armed Forces.

>>52705301
>implying Delta Green and Unknown Armies don't orbit each other as a binary system constantly warring between the importance and insignificance of humanity

The Fate was described as running NYC's "occult underground" for a reason.

>>52705810
>>52705856
>>52705887
Cry some more, Ahmed.

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>>52705887

>>52707206
I like the idea of off the books G-men dealing with The Fate's more isolated "occult underground" more than the idea of official G-men getting involved in UA's more global Occult Underground.

>>52701947
Page 11 for the sig. Last bump I'm giving.

>>52701947
So what's different about the 3rd edition?

Hello fellow wizards

I'm an epideromancer and i was thinking whether it's possible with maybe a major or significant charge or two fuse several human bodies together to one big one and create a servile flesh golem? I need one because of reasons.

Would i need a thanatomancer/mechanomancer to help me with the 'breathe life' part or would i straight up need a demon from heck?

>>52713325
The actual systems changed hugely and they updated the fluff and magic schools to match current trends. Personally I like the first bit, not so much the second.

>>52713325
Everyone has 10 basic abilities which are tied to the Madness Meters (now called Shock Gauges) and move up or down based on a sliding scale of how hardened you are to a particular trauma (for example the Violence meter has both Connect and Struggle on it, the more hardened notches you have the better you are at biting people's ears off but the worse you are at being charming).

Every character has identities which can substitute for abilities and a bunch of other options (you get to pick 3 for each). Things like being an adept or an avatar are included under this umbrella. There are also mechanics for measuring relationships between people (and using them to put folks in bad positions) as well as defining a group objective and creating characters as a collaborative exercise (this was intentioned to get around the 'what the hell am I supposed to do with this/why would this group of weirdos work together?' thing. It's optional, I'm not using it in the game I'm running atm). One thing I'm a big fan of is the Coercion mechanics for threatening people's gauges.

The timeline has moved on a bit, a lot of the old players in the OU are either gone or in completely different positions and new ones have popped up like mushrooms after a storm. There's been a tonal shift too: the OU seems less grungy and the adept schools have less grit which is a shame, that said some of the new stuff is cool (like GNOMON and the Jesus Christ Advisory Board, a forum for would-be messiahs/cult leaders). Personally it doesn't bother me too much as material is easy to retrofit from previous editions.

>>52713477
You'll probably have better luck if you use components that are still alive.

>>52713477
I'd probably go with
Significant for merging, but they must all be alive to begin with and it won't be servile so much as insane mass of people.
Major for what you want, because a major is reality warping crazy shit.

Maybe mix it up with some other adept magic, maybe even some sort of ultra-rare low magic crazy ritual, if they are corpses you are putting together to get the life going.

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>>52713676
>>52713694

Alright, if we assume the people are still alive at the time of creation, how would i merge the consciousness into a single, handy and servile mind that doesn't want to die at any given time of day?

>>52713704
Use something that already has that mindset, like a dog, as the brain. The trick will be getting it not to freak out long enough so that you can train it to use the new body. A gradual transition should do the trick.

>>52713676
Haven't read up on the new edition but what you have said sounds like they grabbed most of the neat shit from A Dirty World and Better Angels and added on Unknown Armies, which I like the sound of.

>>52713750
Intriguing, but how do you suggest i gradually transfer a dog's brain into a hulking abomination?

My first guess would be somehow keep it sedated at all times, then later use my skills in blood magic to purge the vessel of it's debilitating addiction to horse tranquilizers.

>>52713755
More or less. You can see the DNA of a bunch of Stolze's other work in there if you squint.

>>52705810
>>52705856
>>52705887
That's disproportionately powerful for a significant ritual and IIRC there are no major rituals.

>>52713777
The biggest risk is that the mind will crack or rebel and then you'll have a bunch of wasted materials - or worse - a marauding abomination on your hands. I would suggest a transition of gradually interchanged parts with time given between each switch for recuperation and acclimation, like the Ship of Theseus over a period of months or even years.

To keep time costs low I'd also suggest you have several ongoing instances being built in parallel in case of breakage. There's no telling what breeds or training programs would be the most successful (or catastrophic).

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>>52713881
Man of Theseus sounds good, but what about the man part? The people being used as building blocks should be alive as well, and i don't know any plutomancers who could convince them to sell their bodies bit by bit for my project. My first idea would probably go to a hospital to find a supply of comatose/braindead people to use as flesh banks.

Then again perhaps with some precision tampering i could make my own braindead people to use as building material.

>>52713951
People parts are hard to come by these days. If you can roll your own the only issue is the composition and fidelity of the finished product, you don't want and misrouted blood vessels or cross-wired nerve endings.

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>>52714062
Well it seems that i have to start reading a lot about medicine and anatomy if i ever wish to build a giant human out of human legos. Thanks!

>>52714062
>>52714084
Wait, would it be possible to build a giant artificial womb without the woman part, keep it alive through the power of arcane science and birth out a giant person naturally?

>>52714104
Even with only a rudimentary nervous system that sounds like a prime demon vessel to me. I wouldn't trust it and the investment for keeping it clean would be extortionate. That said if you can work up the juice it's your race to lose.

How are you doing for eyeballs and limbs personally? All this isn't going to be cheap.

>>52714271
Still have them all intact, although i did have a plan to go buy some chemicals to peel skin off if needed, maybe chug some poison.

>>52713841
I'd give it to an appropriate adept (fulminaturge, maybe?) who was willing to blow a major charge and go to all that trouble.

Any ideas for a cool new adept school? I'm not feeling the motumancers and such. 2e had better adept ideas.

>>52716876
Someone on the Atlas website gave ideas for an otaku school based around waifuing an imaginary character. You'd gain charges by denying real world pleasures and/or engaging in ritual masturbation/worship and taboo would be something like getting a real girlfriend. Magic is based on forcing reality to behave like an anime, as well as the concept of perfection (or, rather, its antithesis - flaws) The central paradox is that obsession with the perfection with a 2D waifu is with the unattainable as perfect. An otaku like this has no greater dream than to bring their waifu to life but if she were to become a real person they'd be inevitably disappointed with her not being all they've made her up to be.

>>52716956
Thinking about it now, maybe branching off from the same idea: a School founded by otaku adepts who hold romantic anime, as a genre, to be some kind of symbolically purified form of an archetypal mystery play. Its gods and heroes are the Oneesan, the Senpai, the Yamato Nadeshiko, etc. They can charge up by acting out roles in their day to day lives (i.e. living their lives as if they were romantic anime characters, or for significant charges, convincing other people to do so) and can similarly spend them to force reality to behave in a certain way.

Been waiting for this, any of you guys get the deluxe edition with the slipcase/gm screen? Wondering if I should just preorder the main books separately or spend a couple more sheckles on the deluxe one.

Also, I am sad I will probably never play this game, but damn if I don't love the setting and Stolze.

>>52716956
Oh god. Waifuturges.

>>52717037
In fairness, once you get yourself in the right mindset for UA and start looking for the mystical symbolism in everything, waifuism is a REALLY interesting phenomenon. You know how they used to call once upon a time the dude who has entire shelves filled with imagery of the same imaginary figure to whom they are singlemindedly devoted and oftentimes erotically entangled (attracted to yet feeling unworthy of acknowledging their lust for), arguing in the literal forums for her superiority, producing additional images if they have the artistic skill and inventing stories about their interaction with her?

The high priest. Waifufags are the idolators and iconists of the internet age.

>>52717078
>Some creepy dude from Milwaukee drugs and kidnaps underage girls from the street. They are found, dazed but unharmed, in various abandoned buildings. The only connecting thread is that they were all dressed up in the same frilly, revealing faux-Japanese school uniform and wore the same pink wig.

>>52717078
Gain charges by reminding others that their waifu is trash. Taboo if you ever betray your waifu for another. Invoke anime tropes. Waifu magic.

>>52717170
>>52717170
The problem with that charging method is that it kinda requires that adepts of this type exist so that adepts of this type can exist. Unless you can damn the waifu of "normal" otakus without magic powers, but in that case you probably need stricter guidelines about how devoted someone needs to be to their waifu for this to do the trick. Otherwise they could gain 300 minor charges a day just by shitposting on /b/.

My recommendation based on >>52717078 is that charges revolve around physical expressions of devotion to one's goddess/icon/waifu. This taps into the symbolic power and paradox in the center of the school, since adepts think of their waifuing as a form of pure love yet ultimately focus only on its shallowest aspects by definition.

For a minor charge, you need to acquire paraphernalia of your waifu of a kind you don't yet have (a new poster, a new figurine, a new limited edition DVD, a daikimakura, etc.). For a significant charge, you need to produce something yourself, like a doujin or a fanfic. You probably have to dump either a certain amount of money or a certain amount of time into it to "count", so you can't just doodle her on napkins for charges (not that a proper waifumancer would ever think to debase his goddess this way).

For a major charge, I'd say you need to somehow get the original creator of the waifu to make a work explicitly and specifically dedicated to you. Signing a volume isn't enough - but if you can get the production company to include the fan song you wrote into a new episode of the series, that's a major charge.

>>52717233
>you need to acquire paraphernalia of your waifu of a kind you don't yet have
What if they don't make paraphernalia of your waifu anymore? Are you SOL for minor charges?

>>52717170
Formula spell: Your Waifu's a Shit (2 minor charges)

While niche, this curse can produce surprisingly potent results when used cleverly and/or in the right circumstances. It subtly influences people's perceptions with a very, very specific goal: turning them off their loved ones. It emphasizes tiny flaws, turns minor or even previously endearing habits obnoxious and annoying, and causes romantic and sexual doubts to gnaw at the back of the victim's mind. Was their wife always so plain compared to all of their coworkers? Is this boring woman really the one they're considering marrying? What were they thinking when they started going out with a guy who has nothing in common with them? For a week, any roll to have a positive interaction with their romantic partner suffers a 10% penalty, with matched failures inevitably resulting in an explosive argument or otherwise disheartening conflict. At the 3.5 day mark, they also need to roll a Self-3 check - if they really loved someone, those kinds of sudden doubt can hurt.

If they have no loved one, the curse has no effect.

>>52717290
Then they need to start hunting down whatever's on the market like the obsessive otaku shut-ins they are. It's perfectly in theme.

>>52717335
>of a kind you don't yet have
So what happens if you have all the types because they made like four because it was a series that was never popular?

>>52717170
>>52717328
Formula spell: Knock Off (1 minor charge)

This is like a very minor version of the Plutomancy spell "Devaluation". It works by finding out and exaggerating the flaws in a physical object, making it worse. It won't cause anything to crumble to dust unless it was an absolutely horrid condition before, but it can make a gun behave like it hasn't been cleaned a long while, a car engine develop some issues, a windowpane brittle or a wooden beam begin developing rot.

Formula spell: Jade Colored Glasses (? minor charges)

When your every living moment is spent in devotion to an unattainable standard of perfection, your every living experience is one of unbearable wrongness. Waifumancers are, self acknowledgedly or not, the masters of flaw, and this spell helps by magickally highlighting them to them. It can reveal the worst personality trait of a person, the most vulnerable part of their bodies, or the weakest point in a physical construct. Rumors run of a significant spell that can also find the flaws in plans, arguments or ideas, but nobody's been able to confirm it being cast (or they're keeping it very secret).

>>52717359
Use the stuff other people made for their own significant charges. Who knows what they'll sell them to you for?

>>52717411
What do drawings people have made of their waifu count as for minor charges? Obviously making them is a significant charge, but can you get minor charges for having 8 GB of pictures of Reiko Michaelson?

>>52717492
Minor charges only. They're paraphernalia. For the sake of limiting powergaming, maybe say they only work if the creator was a waifumancer and/or if you've paid some serious cost for them. At least a 100$ or so (maybe you can even charge off of paying some DA artist for a particularly fetishistic commission). You must prove your willingness to sacrifice for your waifu.

>>52717530
It should probably be Taboo to lose any of your waifu paraphernalia.

>>52717492
The school probably has a pretty high Ω unless there's some implicit conflict between adepts that muddies the water.

That might even work its way into the taboo or central paradox: your magic depends on the overwhelming belief that what others worship is vile heresy. The veracity of your own beliefs are only as great as your ability to tear down those of others - a secondary taboo based on any interaction with practitioners outside your 'fanbase' maybe?

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>>52705114
This sounds like "The Library at Mount Char", which I thoroughly recommend to this thread.

>>52717411
Their Blast is subtle, but cannot work on anyone who's completely healthy. Instead, it emphasizes the flaws in someone's body. If they have a small cut, it opens wide. If they have a minor cold, it explodes into an instant fever. If they were shot in the chest, the bullet burrows even deeper, etc.

Running a game of unknown armies 2e and need help. The players are members of Interpol, a French detective and an ex Mossad agent, and the game will start out in Marseille. I am planning on having them deal with the shipment of hard drugs from Mexican drug cartels into Europe, by sending them through terrorist controlled areas in Africa and human trafficking. Any ideas on how to make it more supernatural? I am planning on starting the campaign with a refugee ship landing near Marseille and several people on board carrying drugs and being detained, refusing to speak out of fear. Thinking of including so sort of nyarlathotep figure, based only on the poem, being behind it. Any other ideas? Pls help

>>52717626
As it happens, remote Blasts are often used as an assassination weapon among rival waifumancers (i.e. the vast majority), generally hidden inside fake web addresses with relevant porn or packages supposedly containing limited edition figurines. Given that the average waifumancer is a disgusting mess of medical issues just waiting to become manifest (from a life of docile seclusion and a diet of almost nothing but junk food), the Blast can very often cause them heart attacks and strokes. Not always lethal ones, but that depends on the adept.

>>52717640
Drugs of course calls to mind drug magic. Spell dope being 'purified' into sacraments for higher consciousness or the dope is magicked to keep the locals docile (well, docile-r). Perhaps it's not the dope itself that's magickal, but there's compulsions laid across the dope? The act of smuggling being used by an adept to charge up possibly?

Keeping with the theme of "find the symbolism in postmodern practices", how about a School of Magick that draws power from [feelings of] persecution? It could have anything from transblack translesbian transwomen whining about Trump to /pol/fags blaming their every failing on "Jewish feminists" (naturally, it'd be rife with internal conflict since nobody can agree on who exactly is persecuting whom).

Charging would be focused less on one's actual condition or even treatment and more on how it's broadcast to the world. Whining on the internet for minor charges, getting hundreds of people to read your complaints (like on a blog or something?) for siginificants, maybe performing a symbolic act of "martyrdom" on national television for a major one? Like getting people to broadcast you being savagely beaten by the evil, evil enemies of your cause or getting elected mayor of a major metropolitan area on a platform that's explicitly "throw off the shackles of [group of likely imaginary persecutors]"?

>>52717640
Suggestions:
- Take the big scary crime orgs involved in the drug trade to start with ...then leave them the fuck alone. They're fine being mundane monsters that will skin you and eat your family. Be inventive and creepy. Sure. Sprinkle in some odd superstitious/religious behaviour. Absolutely. Use them as a backdrop of obscene nastiness and cruelty to the smaller players in the game.

- Their boss is a real bureaucrat, the kind of officious, nasal asshole who delights in tripping them up on every detail. Underneath this facade she's a rogue Sleeper hellbent on digging into what's going on while the real Interpol middle-manager is chilling in a leaky chest freezer back in their apartment. Add in Sleepers who have been tasked with checking up on her to make things messy.

- A narquis has hidden something special in one of the shipments and will do anything to retrieve their cargo. They're only tangentially associated with the drug traffickers but will lie and connive against and with whoever they need to for what they're after - a magickally boosted hallucinogen which produces it's effects by mere proximity, the ultimate contact high (and opportunity to fuck with your players 'you're behaving erratically, pee in this cup').

- Demon/s. Not only is drug-addiction in something this single-minded already terrifying, but it's trying to expand its consciousness so it can possess more than one person at a time.

How'd you involve the Rosewell greys in all this? My hunches would be either a kind of Revenant or the servitors of a Room of Renunciation (perhaps one that supposedly turns skeptics into "believers" but more often than not just sad loonies). The only problem with that is that the scary thing about the House of Renunciation is that on some very fundamental level its Agents are also all human. Making them "aliens", even aliens born from the mass consciousness, takes something away from the impact.

>>52717801
Messiah mages (or whiners, as their detractors call them) are all about the tension between being a triumphant figure getting their shit completely done in. Their triumph comes from the empathy of an audience, while they have to suffer persecution, physical or otherwise. So a charge requires empathy (in the form of comments, tweets, likes) but you have to post content or broadcast it somehow, unless of course you did it in public. Presumably, in this day and age, whether it's in person or online you'd still be netting your minor charges, but in both cases the veracity of the persecution is less important than the reaction it evokes. The larger the controversy/emotional reaction, the more powerful/numerous the charge. Martyrmancers consequently have high Ω, unless their taboo is super restrictive.

>>52717866
Prior tenants. The Invisible Clergy was a little sloppy mopping up everyone from the last universe. Don't worry the Comte will sort them out shortly (...or not, if you're playing 3e).

>>52717922
How about losing all their charges if they ever suffer a hardship that goes unobserved? Like, maybe not "having a bad thought" or something (though they undoubtedly tweet about those fifty times a day), but if they ever suffer a blow, stab, or gunshot without immediately spending a turn taking a picture and uploading it, they're not providing their suffering a proper exposure. Same goes if they ever get cheated out of money, have their belongings stolen, or even seriously humiliated. Someone pushed you in line for the counter? You must immediately begin blogging about the disgusting white man/nigger/feminazi bitch! McDonald's boy forgot to return your change? You must make a scene and start throwing shit around and screaming. THE WORLD MUST KNOW how badly they have it!

>>52717983
This is pretty neat.

>Be sneaking into the apartment of a rival adept to steal some of their junk for a Tilt or something
>trip over their cat
>make noise, you can hear their footsteps as they rise from their computers in the next room and come over to check
>all your companions immediately scramble
>you instead remain lying there on the floor, tears in eyes, taking a selfie and tweeting about how the patriarchy subverted an innocent cat to trip you just because you're a transcactus

>>52717983
>>52718020
As a bonus, this makes them horrendously vulnerable to magical attacks/hexes/curses of almost every kind since if they're hit with one they're basically forced to break taboo and keep quiet or the Sleepers will off them.

>>52717983
That works. Also, they must never be caught/portrayed in a superior position without casting it as persecution or victory against the Oppressor. Doesn't matter if it's really flimsy, it just has to be able to be cast as such.

I don't know what Christian Chandler's archetype is but he's probably going to ascend pretty soon, and the heavens shall tremble.

>>52717922
These guys need a Significant formula spell that temporarily (an hour?) turns someone into a member of their supposedly persecuted group. A white person black, a man into a woman, a straight gay, etc. Probably racks up Unnatural and Self checks like hell.

>>52718104
If your persecuted group ever becomes a respected and celebrated part of society, does the martyrmancer move on to another group or do they just wither and die?

>>52717778
>>52717812
I like the idea of keeping the drugs mundane in order to contrast some of the weirder stuff, I think I will make it some sort of new super drug, highly addictive but with subtle affects, although it is being discovered as it is on the market for longer that taking it for to long will have similar effects to krokodile.
I also like the idea of their manager being a sleeper and trying to incite a feeling of isolation and paranoia. I also want to try and emphasise a feeling of decay. The port being past its prime, burned out hobos in the projects. Someone yelling at the French officer to get out while in Arabic, while they are doing their investigation.

What else should I include. Marseille has quite a large African quarter so I was thinking of including a gang boss setting himself up as a True King there, while the Russian and Italian mafia fight for control for distribution rights.

I want to try and create the feeling of something truly insidious approaching and slowly corrupting the city. Emphasis the differences between the wealthier southern neighbourhoods and the poorer northern ones.
Any more ideas?

>>52718129
Could go either way, I think. Given that they're more concerned with how people SEE them than how they actually FEEL, it could be that being a "member of a persecuted group" is far more central to their worldview than any actual group identity.

THAT SAID, I'd be wary of going with this idea without some philosophical examination since frankly this strikes me as the attitude of an Avatar, not an Adept. You do not become an Adept without being passionately, obsessively concerned with something. It needs to color everything you see, do, and think. Simply making it look that way isn't enough.

>>52718176
Urban decay is always a good theme to go with and hardcore drug addicts do shit that defies explanation all the time.

- What's the platform of the True King hopeful? What is he selling his would-be subjects on to cement his influence, is it purely temporal or is there a philosophical/religious element?

- Someone who has gotten by with the trappings of being magickal suddenly has to deal with some actual magickal issues. Lots of superstitious trappings and gnomic, but meaningless, pronouncements but really they're in over their head and can't admit it. Maybe they're the religious/magical cornerstone of a particular sub-culture?

- Different Narqui idea: An adept distilled his own consciousness into a batch of drugs. Sure he's dead now but whenever someone partakes he lives through them while the high lasts. Provides plenty of opportunity for random people to accost the PCs and carry on whatever conversation the last stumbling addict was trying to impress upon them, they just have to figure out how and why. Tie it in to something else that's going on as a complicating factor.

- Rosicrucians, because it's Europe.

>>52718422
Excellent ideas. I like the dead Mage living through drugs, would fit in quite nicely, thank you you have given me plenty to work with.

One more thing, could you perhaps give me some more general advice on running unknown armies, pc's are street level btw, new to the setting, and this will be my first time running the game. I have some experience with Mage the awakening, war hammer fantasy role play and don't rest your head. So got any tips in that regard?

>>52718779
Give NPCs quirks. Not the usual rpg traits, but weird little personal things: the egregiously friendly slimeball lawyer with a painful weakness for horseracing, the guy with no legs who sells information along with his paintings on a street corner (always different styles and subjects), or the dockworker who is obsessed with numerology and has an apartment full of chinese lamps. Anyone worth talking to in UA is obsessed with something.

Make things personal to the characters. Take a look at whatever they've given you on background and their passions and obsession and really hone in on things you can bring up in play and give them each individual attention - UA is one of those games that thrives on oddball psychodrama.

I'd highly recommend looking at things like The Illuminatus Trilogy, Foucault's Pendulum, or even The Club Dumas (or the film version The Ninth Gate) for chunks of inspiration if you get the chance.

>>52702013
This pic doesn't even have the shrimp-pill. Get enlightned my dude

>>52717037
It's really just an off-branch of Tulpas when you think about it.

>>52717801
Could be a new type of Avatar? People with a victim complex has pretty much always been a thing but it's a phenomenon that has gained huge traction now that the internet has made it easier for people to get stuck in echo chambers, hell people make careers off of feeling persecuted and/or legitimizing other people's feelings of persecution. When you have that many people fitting the stereotype of "victim" (heavy on the quotation marks) the Statosphere is gonna take notice.

>>52718077
Mystic Hermaphrodite, obviously. I wouldn't be surprised if he/she's been The Freak this whole time.

>>52721282
I think the Mystic Hermaphrodite is about more than crossdressing.

>>52718077
Any news on the poor sod?

>>52716876
I have Phobomancy completed and Chronophagy partially completed. If this thread is still around after I see Life in 20 minutes, I will post them.

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>>52725854
Lookin' forward to it. Bump of life until then. Also, because it's fun to bump a thread from 88/8/8.

>>52727215
Here you go gents, movie was terrible, but I hope my school isn't:


Phobomancy
aka
Boogeymen, Scarecrows, Fear-Junkies

You know that at the end of the day, every action is governed by the same force, Fear. You know that nobody does anything because they want to, they do it because if they don't, something bad is bound to happen. You know that what you are scared of reveals what you think is worth protecting. Your fears are what define your personality, overcome them at your own peril.


Fear is in many ways the primary motivator of not only humanity, but perhaps all life. Fear of dying, fear of hunger, fear of loneliness and abandonment. These are emotions so powerful that even the most base of beasts seems to understand them clearly, so potent are they that once they reach a certain point, they can literally overpower the most secure of minds and make them flee, freeze or even simply just die. Unique to humans perhaps is the nature of fear as a force of attraction; from ghost stories, slasher flicks and serial killer admirers, to those who chase terror by jumping off of buildings, out of near-orbital aircraft or diving into underwater cave systems, fear can easily become a drug, a rush unto itself. While Panic can be a killing thing, a force of unequaled destruction amongst Humans, it can also be a liberating force, a reaction to true desparation that finally frees Men and Women from the shackles of their circumstances.

Many people understand that fear is something that is meant to be listened to, the little, insistent voice that must be acknowledged so that we don't destroy ourselves, but for Phobomancers their fears and anxieties become the fertile ground through which they cultivate their terrifying skills. Whether the heady experience of pulse-pounding Dread,

>>52727693
the subtle pleasures of Paranoia or the perky taste of Shame and Anxiety, the Fear-Junkies want to inflict the whole range of Enyo, Eris and Deimos' delight upon any that they can. This isn't necessarily out of spite or malice (though their victims may disagree with that, as would some of the Boogeymen) but rather that many Scarecrows see themselves as harsh teachers and guides in life, showing through magick if necessary that any fear can be defeated, but none ever conquered.

The central paradox of Phobomancy is simple, Fear is an atavistic emotion, one that is strong enough that it can affect nearly any undertaking that someone may turn their mind to; Boogeymen must master a thing that can never be tamed, laughing in the face of the force that they claim to respect and edify. Phobomancers may feel fear, but they can never show it.

Phobomancy Blast Style: A Fear-Junkie's Blast is a horrific assault of mental images, sensations and hallucinations within a moment's time. There is no real damage done (though the victim certainly believes that there is) through the blast, but what the Mind believes the Body makes real all the same and the psychic wounds only disappear after the target has gotten a full, eight hours night's rest, which can be a tricky prospect when one has had fear-mojo pumped directly into their mind. In spite of the ethereal nature of the damage, it can still kill you, though any clinical examination will likely come up with the standard go to of Heart Attack.

Generate a Minor Charge: Intentionally cause someone (including yourself) to suffer a stress check in any gauge. It doesn't matter whether or not a Hardened or Failed notch is gained, they simply have to suffer the check itself. The Charge is given upon the test itself, rather than the result.

>>52727702
Generate a Significant Charge: Make someone do something they don't want to (this can include yourself, luckily, you just have to hit your own Self gauge) do through a tangible, hostile method like threats, intimidation or just plain creep-factor. The Charge is given upon the target engaging in the action.

Generate a Major Charge: Drive someone insane, meaning that they have failed every single notch on one of their gauge checks, enough to have developed some permanent form of madness. It doesn't matter whether or not the Phobomancer is responsible for the failed notches that came before the final one, only that they're responsible for pushing them the rest of the way over the edge.

Taboo: Phobomancers can break Taboo in one of two ways, the first is if they are witnessed by another acting upon their Fear stimulus, the second is if they fail to accept a direct challenge that questions their courage. Most Boogeymen strike others as unshakeable or unperturbed by even the worst sights imaginable, but often this is simply calllousness through hardened notches that they've intentionally exposed themselves through charge gathering.

Random Magick Domain: Phobomancy deals with the things that terrify, unease or otherwise make people feel out of sorts, conversely it also can bolster, embolden or make them near-immune to those same things. Phobomancy has almost no directly physical uses, but the mental effects that it can impart can range from subtle to gross.

Starting Charges: Newly made Phobomancers start with 5 Minor Charges.

>>52727720
Charging Tips: Scaring people around the office, school or work is a great way to gain reasonable amounts of minor charges per week, but it will certainly attract odd looks, trips to the Principal's Office and HR complaints. Significant charges are somewhat random in how they're gathered, though it is certainly easier to rely on failed stress checks if the level of the check is higher. An easier way to charge, if psychologically damaging in the long-term, is to cause stress checks in yourself through engaging in purposefully risky behaviors, especially those that are directly related to your Fear stimulus. A dedicated Fear-Junkie can probably reap 8-10 minor charges a week just by being a weirdo and taking stupid risks, while gaining more than 3-5 significant charges per month would require a great deal of effort.


Phobomancy Minor Formula Spells:


Who's Afraid Of The Big Bad Wolf?
Cost: 1-10 Minor Charges
Effect: For the next ten minutes (or round, if your target is in combat) the target of this spell suffers chills, paranoia and a sense of deep unease about their situation, no matter what it currently is. In game terms they take a -10% shift on initiative, rolls to notice fine details and to resist intimidation, this penalty can be increased by another 10% or by another ten minutes (or round) for each additional minor charge that the Scarecrow spends, to a maximum of -50% and fifty minutes (or five rounds).

I'm Under The Bed!
Cost: 2 Minor Charges
Effect: After casting this spell, for the next hour anyone who tries to actively search for you if you're making an attempt to hide takes a -10% shift on their rolls. In addition, if you stick to places traditionally associated with nightmares or monsters, such as Closets, Basements, Dark Woods, etc, you become invisible to everyone but pre-adolescents or dogs.

>>52727740
I Wouldn't Do That If I Were You
Cost: 2 Minor Charges
Effect: Choose a target and a particular course of action (this must be clearly delineated,
"running away from me" isn't specific enough, but "flee using my 1999 LeSabre" would be) the next time that the target attempts that action they must make a Rank-5 Self check due to the extreme fear of carrying out that idea. If they still manage to perform that action, it suffers a -10% shift due to their anxiety.

We Know
Cost: 3 Minor Charges
Effect: Study someone for at least ten minutes time, this can be as simple as staring at them from across a room, reading their mail, or even Internet-stalking them. After your observation make a Mind roll, if it is successful, you discover a secret that your target would rather keep hidden. This can be something general such as, "I hope my Tad doesn't discover my infidelity" to something more complex such as, "Beatrice from Accounting can never find out that I've been stealing from the Pension Fund". Unfortunately the Scarecrow can't specifically name which secret they'd like to find out, but it's generally a more vital secret the better the Mind roll. We Know cannot be cast on the same target more than once per week.

Fears Laid Bare
Cost: 3 Minor Charges
Effect: When you live your metaphysical life at the mercy of other's fears, you'll quickly gain the ability to simply sniff them out like a hound. After casting this spell, the Phobomancer chooses a target within view and makes a Soul roll versus the target's Soul. If successful, the Fear-Junkie gains knowledge of their target's Fear Stimulus. The Adept gains the knowledge in the form of a small sensory input, such as the sound of circus music for Clowns, or the smell of burning wood for Fire, it's up to them to interpret it.

>>52727759
Fear Is The Mind-Killer
Cost: 4 Minor Charges
Effect: The Fear-Junkie can steel themselves or others against a specific type of fear for a time, it's not that they forget or rationalize their actions, it's just that they don't make the connection necessary to damage one's sanity. Choose a stress gauge (excluding Unnatural) and roll 2d10. The number that shows on the Tens die is the level of stress check that the target becomes immune to, the singles die is the number of minutes that the target becomes immune to that stress gauge, For example, if Frankie the Phobomancer rolls a 78 to amp his buddy Jimmy up to attack some loser Mak Attaxers, Jimmy would become immune to any Violence checks of 7 and under, and the spell would last for 8 minutes, making his attempt to shoot up a busy restaurant rather easy on the ol' Violence gauge. At the end of the spell's duration, the target must make a stress check on the Unnatural gauge equal to the level of stress that they became immune to during the spell's effect.

Gives Me The Creeps
Cost: 4 Minor Charges
Effect: You may make someone (including yourself) or something into a source of fear for others for an hour's time. By focusing on the target for a moment, it begins to take on a subtly threatening aspect that makes any one in their presence feel uneasy until they leave. Concentrating, or otherwise performing complex tasks is difficult while in the presence of a Creepy thing or person, giving -5% shift to most Mind skills and any Speed or Body skills requiring deliberative thought ( "Assemble Ikea Furniture" would be affected, whilst "Break Yer' Face" would not) which increases by another -5% for every five minutes spent still in the Creepy thing's proximity, to a maximum of -20% if an object, or -10% if it is a person or animal. The GM is encouraged to give positive shifts for People, Animals or Things that are already legitimately Creepy. It's easy to amp up what's already there after all...

>>52727790
The Ol' Toss And Turn
Cost: 6 Minor Charges
Effect: Touch the target of this spell. The next time that they sleep they will suffer horrific nightmares, persisting in their mind even after they wake and they'll almost certainly be exhausted the next day. This causes a -10% shift to all rolls involving Speed and Mind for the next sixteen hours, until the target gets some rest or uses a great deal of stimulants.


Phobomancy Significant Formula Spells:


Who's Behind You?
Cost: 1 Significant Charge
Effect: With this spell you can convince someone for a short time (fifteen minutes) that someone with malevolent intent is following them closely, just out of their view. This is intensely unsettling and can trigger Violence, Helplessness or Unnatural checks depending on the subject's circumstance and state of mind. If used on a target in combat, Who's Behind You entitles the Boogeyman to a free Sucker Attack (UA pg 55) without having to use an action first.

Let's Split-Up Gang!
Cost: 2 Significant Charges
Effect: There is strength and safety in numbers and that's something that simply will not do for most Phobomancers, especially if they need to deal with some meddlesome kids. After casting the spell, the Fear-Junkie can target a group of people, no larger than the tens place on their Phobomancy skill. Make a Soul roll, and if successful the Adept inflicts the crowd with the desire to be alone; this is a compulsion that can be resisted only by suffering a rank-10 Self Check, and even if resisted that does not mean that their fellows will be at all happy to see them coming back their way, perhaps necessitating Isolation checks in the searcher, and Self checks to the person hiding.

>>52727812
Scare You To Death
Cost: 2 Significant Charges
Effect: This is the Phobomancy Blast Style, as noted above it does psychic damage that harms the target in their own mind by projecting terrifying images and hallucinations, triggering a massive physiological reaction through fear response. The damage is passing in nature however, and the Target need only to get a full night's rest to heal completely. Normally this spell only deals Minor Blast damage, unless you know their Fear Stimulus, in which case it deals Significant Blast damage. Regardless of the amount of damage dealt, the target is paralyzed for next the round as their body is rocked by the horror that is being beamed directly into their skull.

Witch House
Cost: 4 Significant Charges
Effect: This spell is Gives Me The Creeps scarier homebody of a big brother. You cast this spell by walking around a location, it can be as large as a multi-storied house, a duplex would be fine, but an entire apartment complex, school, or large mansion would be out of the question; it doesn't have to be the entire location in a straight line, but you must travel over the majority of the perimiter. After making your way around the location, it becomes a conduit for the Unnatural for the next night (or current if it is already night). In game terms the Adept gains access to a pool of Unnatural Phenomenon, 3 Significant and 6 Minor that they're allowed to spend over the course of the night in the Bewitched location at their discretion. In addition to the pool, any being within the locale besides the Adept who cast the spell take a -10% shift to any skills requiring deliberative thought or fine manipulation, as the Bewitched location causes unease on a primal level. Animals will refuse to go near a Witch House and will attack or flee if forced inside.

>>52727740
>I'm Under The Bed!
I love that secondary effect. It's one of those little things that helps reinforce the theme and taps into the symbolism. I might go through some adept spells and add clauses like those, customized for each adept.

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>>52727842
A Witch house only lasts a single night and in addtion, if the Location being Bewitched has a reputation or strong rumor of being haunted (say, enough for a Cliomancer to gather a charge from a murder having been committed there...or if a someone had convinced enough people that it was such a site) the cost of the spell drops to only 2 Charges.

Don't Fear The Reaper
Cost: 5 Significant Charges
Effect: Horror, no matter the type, is a thing that can impress itself upon people so deeply that it can define their lives from that point on. Fear-Junkies can destroy these deep-seated fears and anxieties, stripping the trauma associated with the event away from the subject's mind, like plucking a worm out of an apple. The target (including the adept, if they cast it on themselves) of this spell still remembers the event in question, it just ceases to have any deleterious effect; in game terms the target rolls their Mind, needing to roll under the Adept's Phobomancy skill. If successful the subject may erase a hardened or failed notch in the gauge of their choice.

Phobomancy Major Effects: Create a permanently haunted location, Make someone's fear manifest in reality, Cause a city-wide panic lasting weeks. Cause yourself or another to become permanently immune to fear.


What You Hear: The Phobomancer

Night lights were invented to make people afraid of the dark, after all, who was afraid of the dark before electricity was invented? Their introduction sparked a massive uptick in the amount of charges Fear-Junkies were able to harvest. The constant sliding scale of horror movie ratings is a battle between a pair of Phobomancer Film Directors known as the Blood Brothers and an unknown, but extremely powerful Avatar of The Mother who sits on the MPAA board.

Chronophagy
aka
Clock-Stoppers, Time-Burglars, Day Trippers

You know that all we have in the world is Time. It's not just an important thing, it's the only thing. In today's work-a-day world of produce, produce, produce, a person's skill isn't determined only by how well they can do a thing, but rather how Fast they can do a thing. If a monthly comic artist is said to be skilled, isn't the weekly one even more so? And wouldn't it then follow that the daily artist the most skilled of all? Everyone is locked into the eternal advance and retreat of time, except for You. You broke the bars of your cage, and now you throw others back into it behind you.

Out of all the fundamental forces that govern the world that humans live in, the least harnessed by far is Time; we've tamed strong and weak nuclear forces to produce our power and electromagnetism to store and transfer it. Yet Time remains utterly elusive, even with it being the way that we measure other forces in physics such as Velocity, there's also a subjective component to the passage of one moment to the next, everyone has felt time quicken or slow, or for a moment to seem like it has come before.

Time has always been the topic of scientific, spiritual, philosophical and artistic endeavors, trying to explain or understand the force that pulls, pushes and eventually dooms all of our lives and life's works to dust, memory and then oblivion. All is lost under Time's cruel embrace, except to the Chronophagist, the time they make others waste, they get back from themselves in little starts and snippets. Why, with enough theft, one could achieve immortality. You just have to find a big enough Sucker.

Chronophagists, Clock-Stoppers, Day-Trippers (or behind their backs, Time-Burglars) have always been very rare. It's not that the school is difficult to master due to some potency or particular arcane bent (though that is true to some degree)

>>52728015
but rather that most people really can't muster the commitment necessary to really become a master (or was it slave?) to time. People don't really respect the time that they're given to begin with, we while away hours watching television that serves no purpose, we read books and play games, none of which really advance us in any way. Not you though, you truly live each and every moment because you know it is precious, you stole it after all.

The central paradox to Chronophagy is that by wasting time with others, they inflict the same punishment on others that they themselves shirk from.

Chronophagy Blast Style: Chronophagists have no blast in their school. This doesn't make them any less dangerous.

Generate a Minor Charge: Waste someone's time in a marked way. Tying someone up on the phone when they obviously want to leave, make someone late for the bus by distracting them, slit someone's tires and make sure they're not on time for work. As long as at least an hour of their time has been rendered null-effort, you get a minor charge. The charge is given upon the target's realization that they're not going to make their appointment, or that they've spent more time than intended or needed doing a task. Only purposeful wasting of someone else's time is enough, if the Chronophage reads the directions wrong and gets everyone lost on accident, they don't get a charge.

Generate a Significant Charge: Absolutely wreck someone's day, and we're not just talking in a metaphorical sense. Ruin a long-term project in a work-place through misleading memos, crack the foundation of a building under construction, 'accidentally' tip the cargo of a ship over, drive your car into a store-front window. The more time and effort that is wasted in cleaning up your efforts, the better, especially if it involves multiple people rather than an individual. As with Minor charges, the Chronophage gains it upon the realization of the amount of work

>>52728038
and effort that has either been wasted, or will be required to repair the situation and again, only deliberate actions count towards charge-generation

Generate a Major Charge: Ruin a once in a lifetime event for someone else. Chain call your prey dozens of times before their Ivy-league interview, detain someone on their way to the birth of their child, cut the fuel line of a space-shuttle hours before launch. Major charges are hard to predict because you never know when you're going to catch a person on the most important day of their life, so most Chronophages attempt to simply waste all the time they can, whenever they can. As before, Time-Burglars only gain charges upon the realization of the event's passage, not the actual event itself, and it must be knowingly put into motion by the Clock-stopper.

Taboo: Chronophages have two taboos, the first is Stop. Like time-based Sharks, stagnation and inaction is death to a Day Tripper, making them as much of slaves to the passage of time as non Clock-Stoppers. A Time Burglar must always be engaged in some purposeful, meaningful action at all times. Doing your taxes, washing your windows, organizing your books by ISBN, all would be fine, playing Video Games without achievement whoring, reading for pleasure or simply just sitting around and spending an afternoon drinking would be right out. Sleep is a tricky prospect because it can be considered both a necessity and an extravagance, Chronophages are allowed to rest, but only once they drop from exhaustion, if they do not have at least some sort of exhaustion penalty when they rest, they're in danger of breaking taboo. A Day Tripper's second taboo is that they may never in any way take responsibility for their time-wasting, they may not help clean up their messes, nor in any way apologize for their actions.

Random Magick Domain: Simply put, Time. Anything that deals with the exclusive passage of one event to another

>>52728053
or one's perception of those events can be affected by Chronophagy. A Day-Tripper couldn't turn back the clock and make you do something different, but they could make you repeat the some action over and over again. Chronophagy is extremely powerful, but it is narrow in it's use and it's poor at effects that directly affect another living being beyond those that can be explained purely in a temporal manner.

Starting Charges: A Clock-stopper starts play with 4 Minor Charges.

Charging Tips: Any sort of functionary or bureaucrat is the perfect job (or hobby) for a Time-Burglar, they don't have to say they're sorry and they can endlessly loop you using paperwork based nonsense. Other than pencil-pushing, Chronophagists can easily make terrible Cab Drivers, Call Center Clerks or any sort of Dispatcher. With careful wasting of time (enough not to be fired, you see) a dedicated Clock-stopper could easily reap 4-5 Minor Charges a week, with perhaps a Significant one every week or two.

Minor Formula Spells:

Just a Moment of Your Time
Cost: 2 Minor Charges
The caster burshes against their target in some way, it can be a pat on the shoulder, a handshake or a bump, but physical contact must be made. For the next hour the Day Tripper can yank a bit of time

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>>52728063
from their target, in game terms this allows them to roll their mind, versus their target's, if they succeed then they can take an additional action for one round, and their taret takes none. Only one moment may be held in such a way, multiple versions of this spell may be banked on different targets, but they cannot be used on the same round.

How About We Try That Again?
Cost: 3 Minor Charges

Fast Times at Ridgemont High
Cost: 4 Minor Charges
There's so much to do in a day, and so little time.


Significant Formula Spells:

Once More, With Feeling!

Many Actors, One Act

Chronophagy Major Effects: Trap someone in a 'Ground Hog Day' scenario, render a person or object immune to the ravages of time, bring someone (or yourself!) back from the dead, permanently shift to any particular day in the history of the world, it takes another Major Charge to get back.

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The Sergeant

Attributes: What does it mean to be a leader? Are they the people in charge? If that's the case, does that mean that they're only leaders when their leaders aren't around? Humans are too complex now for the old ways, when Chiefs, Hauptmen or Kings alone were enough to have dominion over them, what was needed was more voices, what was needed what was delegation. The danger when leaders put layers between themselves and their subject is that there is the possibility of rulers becoming estranged from the every day triumphs and tragedies of the existence of their subjects, losing the ability to sympathize with the damage that their decisions can cause. This Archetype is not that kind of ruler. The Sergeant lives among their squad, they eat, sleep, bleed, breathe and die amongst them; indeed, even their status as an Avatar is dependent on them. A Sergeant's devotion to their squad should not be mistaken for dependence or weakness, but rather as a two-way street, where their leadership is both a thing of devotion, and a call for obedience. The central concept to the Sergeant (as opposed to other leadership-based Archetypes such as the True King and The Captain) is that of The Squad, which can range from 3 (including the Sarge) to up to 10 members; all of the Sarge's channels involve the Squad in some way, shape or form.

Taboos: Leave a man behind. This isn't just literal either, if your buddy asks you to help him move and you're the only one, it's time to rent a U-Haul; if you come home and your girlfriend is crying, it's time to call in the next day and make her feel better. You don't have to baby any and every one in your life, but you must respond to direct requests from your 'Squad' to the best of your ability. You don't have to like them, you just have to help them.

Symbols: Non-comissioned rank insignias, Uniforms, Firearms, Reminders of Squaddies, Bellowed Orders, Profuse Swearing.

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>>52728120
Suspected Avatars in History: It's hard to say how many military men throughout history have been Sergeants, but there is always a place for heroic direct leadership in war, the board room and the work place, specific examples may be Lt.Col Jack Churchill, Gunnery Sergeant R.Lee Ermey and Alexander's Generals.

Channels:

1-50%: A good Non-com knows the condition of their troops without even needing to ask, he can read it on their faces and the things that they carry. Anytime that a member of their squad takes damage, suffers a stress check or is otherwise put into serious trouble, the Sergeant gets a feeling of their condition and a general idea of their location, distance and direction only, if they roll on their Avatar skill successfully they can gain a brief flash of their Squaddie's location.

51-70%: Drilling, double-checking and double-checking again pays off. When the Sergeant get their Squad working towards roughly the same goal together (such as 'Beating up that Jimmy, the guy who felt up Frankie's Sister.') they gain a +10% shift in pursuit of that goal. It must be a concrete, achievable end, and they must within sight or shouting distance of their Sergeant in order to gain the bonus.

>>52728134
71-90%: Fear, Distraction, Loneliness and Despondency are the enemies of Good Morale, whenever a member of the Sarge's squad has a stress check within shouting distance of the Sergeant, they may roll their Avatar skill, if successful the check is simply not made. It is as if the event has no purchase within the Squaddie's mind, they remember it, but it is abstracted in such a way that it is simply not terrible to comprehend.

91+%: The Sargent knows his men better than they themselves do, and he can see greatness in them that they may not even know is there. Upon a successful Avatar skill, the things that need getting done, get done; a quick shout and a reassuring pat on the back gives a Squad member the skill they need to get past one specific obstacle that they otherwise would have no recourse to. Don't know how to 'hack' a keypad to get into the Roy Roger's after hours? Bam, Vinnie gives it a good smack and it flashes green. However, if any one in the squad has the capability to somehow get past the obstacle at the hands of skills they actually possess, the channel fails. Regardless, the Channel can only be attempted once every 24 hours.

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And that's what I have currently developed for UA.

>>52728160
God damn anon, nice work.

Because UA is good shit and there is not enough of it I have to recomend the Fault Line trillogy books by Tim Powers as the best Unknown Armies books that aren't Unknown Armies, probably even better than Godwalker which is actual UA. Kraken by China Meiville is pretty sweet too.

>>52727693
>>52727702
>>52727720
>>52727740
>>52727759
>>52727790
>>52727812
>>52727842
>>52727857
Holy shit this is choice.

>>52731908
Seconding Tim Powers. Also the Illuminatus Trilogy is great and relevant to anyone interested in UA.

>>52731908
>>52731950
Thirding the Tim Powers recommendation. Last Call explicitly features a lot of stuff that went into UA. Also recommending Big Machine by Victor Lavalle (though it does waffle a bit near the end) for weird, cultish behaviour and obsession around unnatural phenomenon.

>>52728160
That's some hot stuff right there anon. Great work. One question about the Chronophage though- how many hours would you rule for a PC to be able to go before they knock out from exhaustion? It's pretty straightforward to just have them have a -10% shift or some such to represent their sleep dep, but how long could you let PCs run? (And I presume if someone knocks them out or tranqs them, that counts as breaking taboo too?)

>>52731950
>the Illuminatus Trilogy is great and relevant to anyone interested in being fucking awesome in general
FTFY

>>52729564
>>52731950
>>52732993
Thank you very much guys, and as for Chronophagists, I would say that you could easily use the rules presented in Post-Modern Magic for the Dream Mages, you'd get a -5% shift for every 12 hours beyond your normal bed-time. In game terms, i'd say they were safe that they have to at least have a -10 shift.
>And I presume if someone knocks them out or tranqs them, that counts as breaking taboo too?
Yup, no trying to get around the deal with pills or letting others dose you down. You have to let yourself be an utter mess on some level to function.

>>52733484
Imagine a Chronophagist as an antagonist.

>there's someone who's been harassing you and your friends
>calls just before you leave the house so you miss your every-half-hour bus
>car malfunctions you'd swear are sabotage but can't prove
>ludicrous amounts of spam mail forcing you to go through 20 pages of email unless you want to risk deleting something important
>dud materials in your cabal's ritual to create an otherspace
>wild goose chase after the perpetrator ending in false leads and dead ends

Dude's wasting the time of local checkers, then chargers, since only the time of the powerful is worth a damn in this world.

>>52733484
Shit, man, do you have these compiled in a doc or something? I'm totally gonna play a fear boy when i get a chance.

>>52734776
No, but I can totally do that, I'll make a thread later on after I'm done running a game.

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>>52737322
Nice!

A friend of mine pointed out that not all spooky scares in-game would require a stress check and i feel like a lil' jumpscare or some general Scooby-Doo tier scaring would be better fit for a minor charge than causing soul-wrenching fear at all times. That's just me though.

God damn i wish more people ran this stuff, i'd run it myself if i wasn't occupied with existing campaigns.

>>52737402
I guess I felt like a needed a definite mechanical trigger for it, "Be Scared" just seemed a little too open for abuse.

>>52737960
Understandable, but Unknown Armies is a smart game best played with a smart GM and other smart players who you can trust to determine whether a scare is spooky.


We're all smart people, right?
Right?

>>52737995
I guesss it comes downbto thebschools which I feel are the best designed, Dipsomancy, Cliomancy, Biblomancy, Plutomancy, GNOMON, Viaturgy, Entropomancy and Epideromancy, which all have definite mechanical effects associated with them, clear paradoxes and taboos. Annihilomancy, Irascimancy and Amoramancy always rankled me because they seemed a lot less solid in the effects than the others.

>>52738444
checkum

Either way your work is very inspiring in terms of character creation, and without bragging i could see myself making a Phobomancer work out.

>>52717866
The aliens arent the agents. Giving people visions of the aliens is the gift of its room to its agents, who are all born again ufo cultists.

>>52721237
Wasnt the martyr an avatar path?

>>52739107
The Martyr seems different than what the The Victim would go for. The Martyr is about dying for a cause, The Victim is about actively pursuing the feeling of persecution.

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>>52734776
Here's the Doc as requested:
https://pastebin.com/JAUgJPwu

>>52737402
>>52737995
Do you think we could sustain a General? We could get a link repository together, I'd like the latest iteration of the 3rd edition books and with the latest edition we have a bunch more exposure; I have some more work to do with some schools that are bouncing around inside my head such as Uxeromancy (Waifu), Dubitabamancy (Magic based around skepticism and doubt of Fortean events) and finally some sort of avataric path based around online shopping.

>>52740633
I dream of a day when /tg/ has a UA General with regular discussion and OC but I think we should at least get this to hit autosage before we start seriously talking about that.

>>52740633
>Do you think we could sustain a General?
If we tried, we probably could. The important question is if we should.

I'd personally say that the occasional thread about UA where people post homebrew would be good, and having a dedicated trove for the official books, /tg/ brews, and other useful stuff is great, but I don't think having a proper general is what's best. Also, there's 25 posters in this thread, with a very small chance of growth, so it would probably become a circlejerk really quickly (see: pretty much any other general for smaller games). Maybe having a thread once a month or so would be good, but more often than that and we'd probably run out of steam (or worse).

Small note to the others: it sounds better as Uxorimancy, and the online shopping sounds like a more adept-y thing, but maybe there's some archetype that fits into a similar niche but is a bit more broad (the Consumer, I'd say).

>>52741147
Fair point.

As to the schools I mentioned, I think the tension of the Iconomancer Waifus would work if we got a decent charging structure and paradox to them; there needs to be a reason not only tp be a creepy real-doll/animu obsessed freak, we have to give them a reason to mix it up woth others.

Regarding Stress Checks, what's your threshold /tg/? What rule of thumb do you use to determine if something is bad enough to warrant a check?

As an aside, I've been limiting Stress Checks to one a scene unless the stimulus is completely different (eg. the guy who was shooting at you pulls his head off and gives it the gun before it spiders after you). Anyone make any of their own clarifications (or mods) on how the system works?

>>52742089
I tend to forget about stress checks until my players bring it up.
And then I gauge what I figure the situation rates at, and tell them to make checks if they don't have a hardened notch at that point on that meter.

EG, last session my group returned from an otherspace; a few hours had passed from their perspective, but it had been 2 months to the rest of the world. One of them had lost his apartment, and the others all lost their jobs, because nobody had heard from them and it was easier to assume they were dead and replace them with people who would actually pay/work.
Someone asked if that was worth a Helplessness check, so I decided, 'yeah, lets call that a Helplessness-3 stress check.'
Only one of them had less than 3 hardened notches in Helplessness, and he passed the stress check.

>>52742411
That's like a Helplessness-6

I hope the books are available from my usual spot at Comic Con.

>>52744918
I was mostly going for "losing your job for reasons you couldn't control", moreso than "losing your job because you were in another dimesion"; that got covered by Unnatural checks when they first entered, really.

I'm ill and at the doctor's right now. Any sort of adept ideas that could come from the idea of curing? The paradox of perfect health: like the waifumancer, it's another state of being that's unattainable yet sought by everyone.

>>52747103
You can cover the "sports and exercise" side of perfect health through an epideromancy variant where you have to push yourself past what's good for you to get charges. Work out for 4 hours straight and take some exhaustion penalties, maybe some minor damage. Shouldn't be that hard there.

The more interesting angle would be a crazy diet and supplement adept. They're the people who try to get "back to nature" by eating only dehydrated seaweed and marrow shakes, when they're not just sticking liquids in an IV and sending it straight to the bloodstream.

Mechanically, they have to track their restrictions. They either have to be costly (I'd ballpark 200 per week), give a 5% reduction to a relevant physical check, or be socially odorous (I wash myself in honey and my hair attracts flies. Are these things related?). Every week they keep to them gives a minor charge. Every season gives a significant. Breaking restrictions breaks taboo.

Their spells can influence their bodies (slowly), command wild plants and animals, and navigate the boundary between natural and unnatural. I'm not sure about formulas yet, but everything should work gradually, to avoid stepping on epideromancy and agrimancy's toes. Most should be the kind of thing that a deluded hippie adept thinks just happen cause "Gaia loves me".

>>52737995
If we were smart people, we'd be chargers instead of ponies ridden for Kickstarter money.

I know waifumancy makes sense because of the real world connection, but what about replacing the word Waifu with "muse" and extending it to famous dead historical figures as well?

>>52747783
I like that, but I'm generally in favor of keeping "meme words" out of UA.

>>52747791
Agreed, that shit goes stale really quick.

That said, references to older stuff (including pop-culture) is all over the cannon adept schools in the new core book - maybe it'd be worth working in a reference to the mythical Galatea or something.

>>52747340
>The more interesting angle would be a crazy diet and supplement adept.

This almost sounds like a new wave Narqui.

>>52747791
I wanna be a meme magician! Praise KEK LOL

>>52750789
Go die.
>>52747783
Well Waifu magic to me is all about putting someone on a pedestal, whilst also keeping them approachable, that's why they're waifu-hunters in the first place, they adore the idea of being with a gorgeous, beautiful, cultured fellow human, but then they find that they've built relationships up so high that when their new utopic partner rips a loud fart, they cant stand them. The central paradox would be the lines between love and disgust, acceptance and rejection or devotion. The Taboo seems like it could be "Forge a long-standing connection to a person who you don't utterly control." or "Find out something that fights against the ideal of the Waifu/Husbando you've built up."

>>52751774
According to >>52716956, waifumancy is more about perfection and the lack thereof. Waifumancers are obsessed with the unattainably perfect. It's not the waifu itself that interests them so much as the idea that she is flawless. If she were real, she'd be imperfect by definition (if only by being defined, preventing her from also being everything she isn't), causing the waifumancer to lose interest. They're the embodiment of furious /cyoag/ posters throwing a 1,000 post shitstorm because the otherwise unbelievably perfect imaginary girl was revealed to like a food item they don't, or the /r9k/er who condemns all "3D" women for an anime character because he can only be sure SHE is virginal. They are like a twisted mirror of the Nietzschean ubermensch, their lives a constant struggle, always yearning, always seeking, always desiring, but never finding. Never reaching. Never satisfied. Nothing is ever good ENOUGH. Anything could be better, so it's worthless.

>>52751938
I really, really like that, it makes them have a frenzied feel to them that sells their inherent madness. It still tracks with my Taboo ideas I feel, finding out that Tracer was a lesbian could've tabooed a whole bunch of them for instance. Another question, should it be a single specific Waifu, or more general in nature? We could make them akin to Biblomancers, collecting perfect Waifus so that they may keep spells bound within them, but ever fearful of casting said spells as it would make the doll 'Less Special' afterwards.

>>52752124
God, that's good. Invoking a waifu makes her just a tool, rather than something perfect.

>>52754066
That should probably be a school split ala eastern/western cryptomancy. They have slightly different taboos and formula spells, but share the same mystic parking space.

So spitballing this out, we have two core waifuist schools. There is the one described here >>52717233, which picks one waifu and sticks with it for the long haul. They should have a ritual for changing their waifu if things go bad, but its like a Videomancer changing their fetish show and not done lightly.

Then there's the Harem style Waifuists. They can have as many waifus as they want, but their taboo hits all of them. They can drop a waifu for a reduced penalty or maybe they have a formula spell to make them immune from taboo for that waifu for a period.

If you're being polite, the schools call each other monogamous and polygamous. They should share some spells, but monogamous waifumancers emphasize how perfect their waifu is in their magick, while polygamous waifumancers emphasize how flawed everything else is.

So, inspired by the probably anachronistic yet strangely enticing herpemancers (snake adepts) from Break Today, I decided to try an make ursomancers: bear adepts. Like the herpemancers, it's kind of the point that they exist despite no longer having a place in the modern world and are a bit of a dying breed, considered weird even by other adepts. Also like herpemancers, their powers revolve not around the physical animal they worship (and/or geeky, not-so-borderline fetishistic love for it) but its symbolic connotations. Like the snake, the bear is a potent, auspicious animal, revered and feared in equal measure by basically every ancient culture which encountered. Like the snake, it has a paradoxical assortment of meanings: on the one hand, a sacred guardian, a nurturing healer, a wise guide and a loving mother. On the other hand, the living embodiment of death in the woods, the ultimate monster, fear on four legs. Once, ursomancers existed among the Ainu of Japan, the Sami of Finland, and much of North America. Today, there MIGHT be 2-3 left in the world, probably around Canada, Alaska or Svalbard.

Need ideas for charging methods, taboos and formula spells beyond the obvious "talk to bear", "become a bear", "scare people out of the woods".

>>52754917
Dude, formula spells write themselves.

* Mama Bear: temporarily become Avatar: The Mother equal to successful Magick: Ursomancy roll (probably needs to be either really pricey, have some major drawback, or a combination thereof)

* Bear Hands: Cause firearm damage/just plain get a big bonus to HTH damage.

* Bear Necessities: instantly find enough water and food for someone for one meal (maybe fish and berries in the woods, or a leftover pizza in the city)

* Brother Bear: get a Body based skill representing raw sexual attraction (perhaps only to men?)

* The Tao of Pooh: By just having someone sit for a few seconds, smell the flowers and eat honey (or a honey cake, or muffin, or candy), temporarily immunize to/cure some stress.

* Animate Teddy Bears.

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>>52755073
> Mama Bear: temporarily become Avatar: The Mother equal to successful Magick: Ursomancy roll (probably needs to be either really pricey, have some major drawback, or a combination thereof)
Not really, just needs to be Significant level and they need to have clauses making sure that they can't channel any different Magick whilst they're doing so, similar to how Personamancers and their masks work.

I can think of a couple more:

Invoke Elijah could be a decent blast spell, you read 2 Kings 2:23-25 or something like that, your target gets bit by a FUCKING BEAR!

There's also a Brave-styled spell somewhere in there too, either turning yourself or your target into a bear.
>>52754452
Harem v Monogamous makes sense, but does that mean that they'd have opposing charging methods? Would the Monos need to clean, bathe, feed and clothe their Waifu like the Babylonians did to the statues that they believed theirs Gods resided in? And conversely, would that mean the Mormon-styled ones would need to neg on other people's loved ones? Because those both sound like really good minor charge gathering methods to me.

>>52755073
Hell, bear ties into any number of archetypes. And not even weakly. Savage, Mother, Warrior... probably even the True King (through its symbolic connection to King Arthur).

>>52755350
What I was thinking was that both Monogamous and Polygamous Waifumancers have some complementary charging methods and some shared methods. So it creates a stable equilibrium that binds the community together. So far I have

Waifumancy - A Product of Divided Minds

Minor Charge;
Monogamous: Perform a minor devotional ritual to your Waifu, which takes 4 hours if only you are involved or 1/2 the time for each compatible* involved participant. During the ritual, all participants must treat your waifu as real. These rituals need not be public.

*Two monogamous participants cannot share the same waifu. Polygamous participants have no such restriction.

Polygamous: Rag on someone else's loved ones. The loved one can be real or fictional, but the person involved must be passionately willing to defend them and take the comment offensively. Limit one per person per day.

Both: Acquire some memorabilia of your Waifu, such as a commissioned drawing, a figurine, or a recalled limited edition VHS Box set where one of the animators drew her off model.

Significant:
Monogamous: Society must recognize your waifu. Forcing at least a dozen people to change their actions to accommodate a physical representation of your waifu gives you a significant charge. Each group of people can give only one charge per week, but if more than half the participants are different, two groups count as distinct. So you can get a significant charge for getting the morning commuters to give a body pillow with your waifu's picture on it a seat on the bus, but not the afternoon commuters since they're most they same people.

Polygamous: Lower someone's relationship. This need not be a favorite, any relationship will do including your own. Limit one per person per week.

Both: Acquire some unique and symbolically significant object related to your waifu. The first animation cells she appeared on, a ribbon from the model she's based on, and a script from her focus episode all work.

>>52757006
The idea behind these charging methods is to give weird incentives. Mono-Waifumancers want Poly-Waifumancers around, since they'll play along with their delusions easily and cut down on charging time or make getting sigs easier. But Poly-Waifumancers have incentives to break character and screw with the Mono-Waifumancers heads, since that gives them charges. Still, the Mono-Waifumancers can be useful for screwing up other people's relationships, so Poly-Waifumancers have incentives to play nice for a while. But since both charge up off getting piles of useless junk, as soon as they come across some waifu tchotckes, the knives will come out. Or at least the cosplay foam daggers.

For taboos, both should be barred from having a favorite. Other than that I'm not sure.

>>52754917
>>52755073
Neat idea.

>* Mama Bear: temporarily become Avatar: The Mother equal to successful Magick: Ursomancy roll (probably needs to be either really pricey, have some major drawback, or a combination thereof)

Maybe some sort of stratosphere-exposure sickness? Like resurfacing too quickly after SCUBA diving, or maybe the archetype doesn't like having it's string tugged that way? (I vaguely remember that Personamancy from 2e had an effect that mimicked avatars that was potentially hazardous).

>>52754917
I'm not sure that simply being a dying breed and lacking a place in the modern world is enough to account for the central paradox of their identity. Similarly, the mother bear/angry bear dichotomy you present is only one of aspects. It doesn't feel like there's an inherent identity conflict to be adept-worthy. What do I obsess over that makes me an ursomancer?

Guys, honest question here.

I really want to get into Unknown Armies. I heard that it's "Mage done right" or "Mage meets Call of Cthulhu". Is that true? Can I have a serious (or at least semi-serious) game instead of a lolrandumb-cuhrayzee-madjickal plots I keep seeing?

>>52762549
You can. It's possible at least.
If your games are 'lolrandumb-cuhrayzee', that's more a fault of you and your group than the game itself.(Or the people/groups in the stories. Let's face it, a serious game isn't worth posting shit about.)

>>52762549

I'm gonna handle this as two separate questions:

>Mage stuff
There's a lot here. Unknown Armies has four (maybe five) distinct ways to "do" magick (yes, it spells it with a "K"). I'll briefly summarize each, in generally ascending order power/weirdness wise, and let you decide if it sounds like something you'd want in your game.

>Being supernatural
Some people are just weird, for whatever reason. Maybe you're psychic. Maybe you can give people the Evil Eye. Maybe you can divine the future in bird entrails. For minor, relatively focused stuff like this, the game doesn't even give you an extra subsystem. Instead, these are handled as"Supernatural Identities". In UA, you have Identities (Getaway Driver, or a Tweaker, or Paranoid, or a Telepath, or...). Supernatural Identities (Telepath, in this example), are very low-power compared to the rest of the UA magickal universe and are generally more flavor than anything else, but it's a way for a character to do magick without committing to being a full-blown "mage".

>Being a Wizard
Yeah, like, the regular kind. Salt circles in dirty smoke-filled basements, animal sacrifices, the real Aleister Crowley stuff. These guys still exist in the UA universe, and they're the real deal. They operate based on "Rituals", which you can kind of thing of as pages in a spellbook. These characters (called "Thaumaturges" in-fluff) do their magick by hunting down rituals in forgotten libraries, forbidden parts of the Vatican, dusty old used book shops, or on the goold old black market, and then can use them--repeatedly--to do actual, magickal shit.

(Continued)

(Continued) >>52763271

>Finding glitches in the Matrix
Unaffectionately called "Gutter Mages" in the fluff, the stuff these characters do is less Merlin and more Voodoo. They're essentially free-form magick. Players are given a very rough framework of "stuff you can do and stuff to help you do it", and they're essentially told to make up the spell themselves based on some funky symbolism. You have some of the guy's toenails? Throw that shit in there, that'll help. You want him to be hit by a car? Do you have something representing a car? A toy car works. A scrap of rubber from an actual fatal car accident is probably better. Work it into your ritual somehow. After they get it all together, they roll, and magick happens.

>Adepts
A.K.A. "What people actually mean when they say Unknown Armies wizards". These guys operate based on "Charges" and "Taboos". Charges are needed to do big mojo. Taboos are things that fuck up your mojo and drain you of charges. These guys base their magick around stupid bullshit paradoxes, and so they're all pretty much crazy to begin with. This is what UA bills as "post-modern magick". For example, let's say you're a lettuce adept. Your thing is that you like lettuce, but you can never eat it--that would violate not only its physical being but the idea of lettuce as anything other than a food item. You hate vegetarians. You might be able to gain charges by burning down grocery stores (after removing all the lettuce, of course). An obvious way to lose all your charges (A.K.A a "Taboo") would be to eat a salad. If you're able to save up enough charges, you can discharge them for some of the most powerful, earth-shattering (albeit lettuce-based) effects in the game system.

(Continued) >>52763286


>Avatars, God-Imitators
The UA fluff contains a cast of celestial characters called "Archetypes". Real, mystical power surrounds these archetypes, and anyone who does a good enough job of embodying them gets a little slice of the pie. An archetype of The Captain eventually learns to give commands to mother nature ("Stop raining", then it does). An archetype of the explorer finds himself able to get into and out of just about anywhere. That kind of thing. The more you succeed (and the more you behave like your archetype), the more powerful you get. Beware: Archetypes have taboos as well. If that "The Captain" archetype from earlier ever disregards his crew? Boom, you've just taken what amounts to negative levels in that class ability. You gotta live it to get it.

As for your second question:

>Can I have a serious (or at least semi-serious) game

Sure. There's always a temptation to be a little zany with UA (see: my lettuce example), but there's nothing preventing a more serious game. Hell, pick up some of the UA books from a trove (or piratebay, or even buy them who knows), and read the little fluff bits. UA as written is actually pretty fucking dark and gritty. It'll ultimately depend on you and your players, but there's nothing stopping you from running a serious game here--in fact, I'd argue that the insanity rules as written actively encourage it. Players get *messed up*.

>>52762549
>Mage meets Call of Cthulhu

No, not really. It intersects with the original Mage in that the collective unconscious is incredibly important. See what> >52763297 is talking about regarding Avatars. Avatars can potentially become powerful enough to attempt Ascension and kick out the previous archetype to become one themselves and help rewrite reality.

However, it's not very much like Lovecraft. The entities in Lovecraft are outside our reality, completely alien to humanity. And it doesn't matter what we do, because we're insignificant in the face of them.

In UA, we ARE the entities. The central conceit of the game is "You did it." With all the implications, positive and negative, that come with the phrase.

Pokemon Go is the work of subculture adepts working with otakumancers under the direction of Mak Attax. Possibly the largest fad in recent history, the usage of Augmented Reality devices in occult practices has been proven and proven well. Overlaying the digital with the real- when the real is already so malleable for adepts- it's like giving muggles a small taste of magick.

>>52763708
>The central conceit of the game is "You did it."
You just made me realize that I've completely forgotten to play this up.
I mean, everything my players have run into so far has been either human, human-adjacent, or human-generated. But I remember intending when I started running it to actually use the phrase "You did it." from time to time, just to nail it in their minds like the 1e/2e books do.

Also reminds me, I could use some help making the current plot of my game a little more Weighty. Right now, the players have recently returned from an Otherspace they entered 2 months ago, like I mentioned earlier in the thread. When they left, there had been a few murders committed by a Thanatomancer who was carving 3s all over parts of the corpses she left behind, and my original plan was to have them tracking her down over the course of a few weeks/months. Since they disappeared for a while, though, I ended up postponing some events that would have made it easier for them to catch her. They've also met, as of the last session, two FBI/TNI agents,
who arrived the day they went into the Otherspace, and are also working on finding the "333" killer.
Currently, the plan is They get some help from the FBI peeps to get their jobs back(primarily because 2 of them are/were detectives, and it would be in the agents' interest to have detectives as allies with the local PD to help track the girl down), and then someone calls 911 about a nasty smell from their neighbors apartment; the chick's been leaving the bodies she cuts up for her Blasts in an empty apartment(doubling her body count,
technically). She isn't renting the place,
but she's been bringing her victims there through the fire escape, then killing them and leaving the corpses to rot while she goes out to Blast someone else. After some shit, the idea is they see the FBI peeps in Hit Squad gear, and get recruited into TNI.

>>52759780
It's explicitly inspired by herpemancy, which is in the same situation. Their paradox also doesn't fit in the modern world (snakes are both healing and venomous!), which is WHY they're dying out. What was cool and poignant back in ancient Egypt just doesn't impress all the postmodern -mancers anymore.

>>52705810
Oh look, it's the "The Iraquis had families to, what if they took revenge on you? Don't you feel BAD, Americans? Huh?" spell.

>>52765000
>Iraquis
Is that an Iraqi narquis?

>>52764503
There was an episode of Ken and Rob Talk About Stuff podcast that featured Pokemon Go as an occult conspiracy. Check it out!

>>52716956
Cast a major charge and make her real (if you start dating you're still breaking taboo) or put yourself into the anime as a character (essentially killing yourself).

>>52766469
But isn't the ultimate paradox of the entire School is that if the waifu ever became real, they'd lose interest in her because real people cannot be perfect?

>>52766477
A self-defeating end kinda works as far as adepts go.

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>>52766477
Exactly! Now you've got your perfect significant other, but she'll be marred oh-too-human flaws (she might not even speak English).
Or you can essentially cease to be by becoming a character in the media she is in. Then you'll both be perfect.
J O I N H E R

>>52705114
>the Comte and the Freak in a House of Renunciation

...jesus, talk about high stakes. Please tell me the Comte canonically wins, or at least it's open ended at the moment.

>>52705810
I thought this was going to be a sex thing. Somehow.

>>52769092
The Comte came out as a now mortal woman Old Mother Apocalypse. The Freak became the Human Eternal, and is basicly the new Comte. This was a mutual agreement between the two.

>>52769233
>This was a mutual agreement between the two.
[citation needed]

They leave it vague, whether the Comte was forced to go in, or agreed to do so, and, well, once you enter the House, you can't come out until that room does its work.

>>52766477
>>52766469
The ultimate expression of Entropomancy is shooting yourself in the head with the Revolver you were playing Russian Roulette with, Epideromancy's is bleeding yourself to death. I think that would be an utterly fitting end for a Waifumancer.
>>52769092
Ol Mother Apocalypse is gathering the Comte's Sorrows, failed Avatars and other Renounced Individuals like herself presumably to overthrow the cosmic framework. It's utterly unclear what The Human Eternal is doing beyond telling the Joy/Sorrow situation to fuck off.
>>52757006
>>52757156
I like how it reflects the old antagonism/symbiosis of the Cryptomancers, they need each other, but they also feed off of one another in a parasitic sense. The only nagging point I have is with the Poly's relationship lowering, it's a bit loosey to me, perhaps we could extend it to having them confront the source of their troubles?
>>52769092
I had my money on Heroin/Coke.

full 3rd ed pdfs when

>>52770918
I don't know if it's necessary to give more mechanical weight to relationships, since they now have a percentile. It takes work to get in between two people, so poly-waifumancers will have their work cut out for them. I imagine they'll end up like socially focused Anihhilomancers, but instead of hanging around in rathole apartment in a trenchcoat, its this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=87WaaTGf8eY.

Okay, I've been thinking about taboos. Mechanically, both cannot have a favorite. They get a "relationship" with their Waifu that a player can and should be encouraged to develop, but without mechanical reward.

Monogomous waifumancers are forbidden from being in any non-Waifu romantic relationship entirely. They taboo if anyone else sets them as a favorite (which could be a really weird way to try to taboo an adept. If you can find someone desperate enough, it could work). Polygamous Waifumancers are only forbidden from developing emotions for real people. They can be around them and even get married and start a family, but have to see them as tools which can't compare to their waifus. I'm thinking that you could reflect this by tabooing if they increase a personal relationship. So if a polygamous Waifumancer has their old college buddy Danny as a guru, if that relationship ever goes up its taboo. However if their guru is the anarcho capitalist community, that's fine.

Furthermore both should taboo from disrespect to their waifu. Monogamous Waifumancers taboo from getting any of their personal waifu memorabilia damaged, while Polygamous get tabooed from getting their image of their waifu damaged. So if a polygamous waifumancer has a waifu who he thinks hates children, putting together a collage of posters of her playing with a bunch of smiling kids taboos. Mechanically, you can find out what will do that with a few notice and connect rolls and then its just a matter of catching attention.

>>52740633
>>52741180

Start a general so people(and me) can find a consistent 3rd ed download link. That's like, half the reason generals exist you fucks

>>52773637
>>52774437
Biblomancy or no, there's no reason to get an attitude newfriend. I don't have the full 3rd Ed PDFs myself and I'm the guy who made Phobomancy. Chill.
>>52773926
SO they have a constant time/xp sink similar to how Mechanomancers have their rated inventions. Should we have a distinction between minor and significant waifus, for instance, an inflatable body pillow is fine for gathering minor charges for Rei, but nothing but a full-on Rei Real Doll will allow you to get Siggies and Majors. And the idea of the personal and impersonal relationship is genius, it allows them to have a reason to interact with others, even if they're the crazy, shut-in Mono types. And I apologize, I actually forgot that relationships had a mechanical aspect to them now, in which case it makes a fine charge structure. I guess next we need to start moving on to their overall random magick domain and formula spells.

>>52774437
>>52776751
I've got PDFs, but I also have the tech savvy of a small pond, so I'm not sure if they're watermarked. If someone wants to check that I can email them and they can set up a trove with that and all the other books (including the nice clean PDFs of the older books from the KS).

Does anyone know how to get the old Unkown armies website to load.

http://ua.johntynes.com/

every hyper link seems to be dead.

>>52777225
Its alright for me.

>>52777225
Anon, I'm afraid I've got some bad news for you...

The John Tynes site is dead, I've spent days searching for a backup, but there are only about 10 articles from the site archived through Wayback Machine and that's it.

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>>52777334
>all those cool hooks, rituals and classes
>gone for good

>>52777297
tell me your secrets wizard?
anything i try I either get an invalid page error or the page just refuses to load.

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>>52777367
And chances of site recovery don't look great either...

>my books got returned to sender

fucking shoot me

>>52777225
>>52777297
>>52777334
>>52777367
>>52777405
Greg Stolze is planning to make a new version of it on his site, whenever 3e officially releases.

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>>52777388
I don't get it.

>>52777453
From the description of what Stolze is planning, the Statoverse, it doesn't look like it'll have anything related to the old site on it.


>>52777467
Try accessing an actual page, you won't get anything.

I adore this setting but Ive never actually played a pen and paper rpg before, how do i actually find people to play with?

>>52777334
>>52777405

like a year ago i was able to ghetto my way across the website by going into peoples profiles and riding hyper links across the website from the articles they had written, cant even do that any more.

>>52777630
>best
Find people in your group of friends who are also interested in trying an RPG, run a few sessions for them, then see if someone else wants to step up to GM.
>close enough
Find your closest LGS, get to know the people there, ask them if they want to get a group together.
>we must be cautious
According to the counter, there's 45 unique posters in this thread. There's probably enough people here looking for a game that you could get a group together.
>probably a bad idea
LGS, but without getting to know the people there.
>do not do this
Digital randos, no vetting, Final Destination. All the fun of the above with none of the social cues.

>>52777777
Waste

>>52777784
Eh, there's only 6 of them. I'll be impressed when I accidentally get septs. I feel like my standards are too high there, but it probably balances out with my low standards everywhere else.

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>>52777777

So can i just not get the books anymore cause I missed the kickstarter?

>>52762549
It was made by a guy who did work on Mage: the Ascension and someone well known for their CoC work, so that's a fair assessment.

UA3 is actually completely able to be run without any of the Cosmic Bumfights stuff; Identities, reality bruising and the build-a-school Adept rules are enough themselves to make a magic game out of.

I don't know why you would want to, but there you go. Take the interesting parts of the setting, add your own stuff, and make your own Occult Underground.

>>52777949
PDFs at least are on sale, books aren't far behind if they aren't up yet.

Also, my offer from >>52777195 is still standing to whoever wants to put in the effort to set up a trove.

>>52777828
Getting six sevens in a game about occult obsession never quite fulfilled is fitting as hell.

7 is an auspicious number
6 is an inauspicious number, but is three and three again.
Seven sevens would be more auspicious (seventh son of a seventh son and all), but septs come just short.

>>52778152
>septs come just short
Septs would be 7. 6 doesn't really have a good term. Sexes is already something, and hexes makes it sounds even worse which could be a good sign that the inauspicious part is correct, but that level of numerolinguistic analysis is neither here nor there.

>>52778152
What about some kind of 4chanamancer, you gain charges by getting repeating digits, claiming people are big guys(for you) and just being a general basement dweller.

chan culture might have become a big enough part of the collective conscious for something like that to emerge.

>>52777777
>not being a numeromancer

missed out on a nice charge there buddy.

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>>52778249
I mean Mutomancy and Sociomancy have 4chan/reddit/SA's feel covered pretty well, you could probably throw in Irascimancy in there too for Keks.
>>52778107
Stolze worked on M:tA? Which edition?
>>52777949
I got mine through Da Archive, but as >>52777195 offered, if someone can comb through them for watermarks we could start a trove up.

>>52779077
PDF dude here, I'm going to sleep because I'm not an Oneiromancer and have shit to do tomorrow, but if the thread's still alive tomorrow and someone puts an address, I'll send the PDFs along when I can.

>>52779584
Works for me, I'd do it now but I too am unable to parse how the fuck to get rid of watermarks. I'll go finish Chronophagy and Uxeromancy instead.

There's an otherspace that contains a Groundhog Day of 9/11- except in this otherspace, the plane hijack never happens. It's just another usual, hectic working day in the Towers. But the day keeps repeating. It never ends. The inhabitants are slowly going mad. A couple are planning to break out into 2001. They think that doing 9/11 will break their curse.

Someone has figured out how to gain charges by pissing on toilet seats.

It's actually aliens that are pissing on toilet seats.

A men in black conspiracy is devoted to pissing on toilet seats.

>>52780954
How would they even know what 9/11 is if it never happens?

>>52781215
There's a man in New Jersey that has to add the concept of piss on a toilet seat to every thought in his head. He used to be a powerful adept, but had his mind broken one day in an attempt to gain the power to transfer charges. Some say he has a major charge on him, waiting to give it to the one free him from this piss induced hell.

>>52717035
I did and it's fantastic quality

>>52782243

Ditto. Not that there's anything in there you couldn't get in PDF form, but it's super nice looking if you're the kind of person who likes that.

I've got an idea for Psychomancy - the adept school revolving around mad psychological science.

I've got a charging structure and taboo, but haven't gotten the formal spells down. Anyone want to see what I got so far?

What's the best way to describe this game to someone who's a complete newbie to rpgs?

>>52778107
>UA3 is actually completely able to be run without any of the Cosmic Bumfights stuff
I think that's one of its biggest problems.

>>52779077
He threw down for Time of Judgment, but mostly did Vampire and Hunter stuff. Notably he wrote for Clanbook: Giovanni

>>52782436
Cosmic Bumfights. Or David Lynch does Constantine.

What do you guys think about a -mancy focused on the idea of obsessing of some period of cultural history that the person thinks is better than the current one?

An example could be someone who thinks the Wild Wild West is the best era of American history. They could idealize an image of cowboys as rugged masculine heroes, while in reality not only was the period mostly faked, but the person wouldn't enjoy returning to that supposed "time" as it never existed as we now understand it. In fact, any return to an imagined "Golden Age" could fit the bill, whether it was the Roman empire to Shogunate Japan.

>>52782530
That's fair, but I assume you run it, yeah?

Being able to separate out the idiosyncrasies really helps players get it faster and add their own wrinkles to the shared world, in my experience.

It's also damn helpful for actually making the weird shit function on spec with everything else in the world.

>>52782534
Could probably be referred to as Nostalgiamancy. I'm newer to the setting, but I could definitely see it working as an adept class.

>>52777784
>>52777828
Actually, by being 6 times 7, just short of mystical perfection, one attains the essence of frustration at imperfection, by itself a potent symbolic gesture.

>>52781304
They know what it was that was supposed to happen. Whether they were told by their creator or it's just innate knowledge, they know that they're the avoidance of the event. But from their perspective, since the thing didn't actually happen, they have to make it happen to break free. Since their otherspace doesn't extend far enough to simulate the entire world, that means they need to hijack a real plane. Therefore, they'll have to crash the real towers.

What I'm saying is, they're the retroactive cause of 9/11, created as an avoidant gesture because They Did It. A little recursive nod to the nature of the rest of reality, as it were.

>>52783548
there's no way a rando couple in new york could engineer a plane hijacking and crash in a day
OR IS THERE

>>52776751
not me you chill, I'm just here for the pdfs until I can scrape together for a full se

t>>52777225
I regret not saving things I liked when I first visited that site in HS. I'm running a 2nd game but in the 3rds time as I crib stuff from the alpha release, and the bits and bobs on that site would've been very helpful

>>52785064
>there's no way a rando couple in new york could engineer a plane hijacking and crash in a day
Well they do have an infinite amount of this one day to plan, and they do have the advantage of their plan already having gone right in the futurepast.

For those thinking about doing a general, if it can't be sustained maybe just have the general only on a certain day like "Unknown Armies Wednesday"

If I'm interested in UA, should I read the earlier editions, or am I fine just starting with 3rd.

>>52787115
It's not a problem with sustaining, it's a matter of content. A monthly thread on the 3rd, obviously would probably be the better option.

>>52787223
I would recommend 2e to start out with the cosmology, since a lot of 3e's changes are pointed at people who already know about how things work. 3e's the better one mechanically (at least if you stick in setting), but if you're not planning on running any time soon, 2e's a better read.

>>52787275
So I don't need to bother with 1e at all?

>>52787680
2e is basically just a polished version of 1e, both mechanically and in fluff. I appreciate having the 1e PDF, but it's the absolute last thing you would need to read to have a full picture of UA. You might want to skim its rules if you look at the earlier splats, since some terminology changes, but other than that you should be fine.

>>52787275
>A monthly thread on the 3rd, obviously
This is a good idea.

>>52787882
If people decide to go through with this, my offer regarding PDFs is still open to whoever wants to be our trovefag. If someone gets a trove set up, I can put together a good pasta and start it up when the time rolls around.

>>52787742
Could you share the 1e rulebook PDF, pretty please? Never could track it down.

>>52788499
I'm the same PDF guy as before, so as soon as someone's willing to check all these for watermarks, we can have a complete, clean, high-quality trove set up, including 1e, 3e, and all the splats.

anyone have any reccomended media to get that capture the feel of unknown armies? Besides Godwalker and the musick packs of course.

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>>52789416
Twin Peaks, Sense 8, The OA, Oz (The HBO one, seriously), Carnivale, It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia (Again, dead serious.)
>>52788556
>>52788499
Well here's the link from DA ARCHIVE: https://www.mediafire.com/folder/gd5s5iryj8yl8/Unknown_Armies

Maybe we could use this as the basis?

>>52789416
tim powers books

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>>52789416
Hotline Miami 1, 2 and Wildlife.

>>52719573
Not even the bog-pill, of which I need a quick rundown.

Has any one used the Classic Occultist rules from Thin Black Line? I just picked that up from the like that >>52789554 posted and they look fucking bad-ass, but the -50% shift seems fucking ridiculous.

>>52789559
Reading last call right now, I was pleasantly surprised that it is IMMEDIATELY unknown armies (and by extension, chaos magick) as fuck from the word go. Excellent read so far.

>>52791400
Yeah, basically anything by Powers works, the same thing happened to me when I watched Carnivale and in the first episode Brother Justin has what can best be described as a vision of the Statosphere. It also manages to be overtly religious without the big G being explicitly an actor within the story, which is also very UA.

>>52717640
Certain south american cartels are known for using symbology to frighten the locals into compliance, see ritualistic gang killings. This somewhat mirrors the mass sacrifice the Aztecs performed with captured soldiers. So... what if the Aztecs never really died out, just went underground and the drug operations are just a side thing for them to amass huge amounts of occultic power.

>>52755350
The feeding and clothing statues is already a thing IRL with people taking their waifu pillows to restaurants and "feeding" them.

>>52792425
Well then that means it is even more suited to it. I specifically brought it up to try and tie the style to something other than Pygamilion & Galatea.

>>52789584
I can't find the wildlife to which you are referring care to be more specific?

>>52789416
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DLGrXGEMOSo

To me Repo Man describes the style of a Street Level game perfectly, way more than any of the other recommendations in this thread.

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>>52793744
Wildlife is a comic, I found my version on /co/'s archive.
>>52793815
Definitely, I had forgotten about that movie until you brought it up.

>>52789416
Se7en and Fight Club always struck me as nailing UA's visual style.

>>52789416
The Lost Room, 100% UA shit all the way. Fuck them for not doing more than 1 season though

I need more UA-like media. I have already seen and read all the suggestions so far.

I HUNGER FOR MORE!

>>52801741
American Gods could work, The Illuminatus! Trilogy, The Man Who Was Thursday, Dead Souls could fit, The Dice Man is basically about an Entropomancer, Catch-22 worls as well, given that all of the characters are crazy people who follow different compulsions to help them get through the War.

>>52801741
Ink
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZBGeErufQdY

>>52802967
Yeah, but one of the things for UA is Inhuman shit is all ultimately Human.

>>52806333

I mean, I don't know how literally you want to take that statement. A gestalt of human consciousnesses created the universe, yeah, but does that mean that cats are ultimately human? Or dolphins? Or rocks?

Humanity is in charge of the universe, but there's plenty of stuff in it that isn't human and was never human. One of the strengths of the setting is that a GM can drop just about whatever they want into it and it'd fit in just fine. Mole-men? Sure. Aliens? Sure. Why are they there? Who the fuck knows, the universe was created by a bunch of psychos.

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>>52801741
John Dies at the End, book or movie it's all good

>>52807697
I suppose that I should walk the statement a little bit to be fair, I think that everything in the setting ultimately has a human origin, even the weird shit like the Reality Doctors, or the Tenebrae. It may be some-what headcanon, but I like it as a way of distinguishing it from basically every other horror setting out there.
>>52809215
I agree with the Book, but the not the Movie. The Movie was kind of pussy in comparison.

>>52704536
This suggests the old card game of Mao.

>>52806333
Have you seen the movie?
Everything in the movie is or was human, at some point. Ink and the Incubi are confirmed for being the ghosts of people who had way too much pride/could only ever focus on their own flaws, and the Storytellers are the ghosts of people who were happy with themselves. All the Drifters are everyone else.
They could all be done in UA as some sort of Revenant, if you wanted to.

>>52801741

Try Alan Wake. It's... a trip, and well worth it as a vidya purchase. Even the wierd semi-sequel American Nightmare is UA-ish, even if it's genre shifts from psychological horror mystery to a more actiony sort of thriller

>>52809215
You have reminded me that I need to get the third book, and yeah >>52809487

>>52810381
Shill your shitty vidya no one's heard of elsewhere, fiend. THat piece of shit is no where near UA related.

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>>52812424
>Alan Wake
>shitty vidya no one's heard of

>>52812851
It's pretty popular, but you have to admit that Alan Wake has almost nothing in common with Unknown Armies. Alan Wake is pretty clearly just a Steven King book adapted into a videogame.

>>52812870
Nah I do agree that it isn't UA material, I'm actually having a hard time coming up with example of UA vidya

>>52801741

Try the Diogenes Club series by Kim Newman. Possibly also the Land Across or the sorcerers house by Gene Wolfe.

>>52812870

Depending on your interpretation of the Dark Presence, it could be very UA, to be honest; at the very least the themes of insanity and power that it has are quite unknown armies esque, I feel. Just because it's like one thing doens't meant it has to be unlike another.

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>>52812928

The Shadow Hearts series - particularly Covenant. To give a basic overview of the plot Grigori Rasputin is the leader of a secret cabal of wizards and has succeed in summoning Asmodeus to take over Russia. He must be stopped by a man who can transform into monsters through eating souls , the king of the wolves , a gay pro-wrestling vampire who moonlights as a superhero , an old sorcerer with a possessed puppet a fortune telling gypsy , Anastasia Romanov and several others. It also includes time travel , Clones , a lovecraftian sanity system and enemy design , King Solomon as a secret boss fight and side quests that include hunting for vintage gay smut retrieving WMDs from the moon.

>>52812928
>Nah I do agree that it isn't UA material, I'm actually having a hard time coming up with example of UA vidya

I'm sure there's something in the point and click genre.

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>>52813117
No, because it's all about Otherworldly beings taking over. Look, did you guys learn *nothing* from TNI? That shit doesn't fly in UA at all.
>>52813338
>>52812928
Hotline Miami.

So speaking of media for the game. Does anyone have a copy of the audiobook version of Last Call by Tim Powers to share? I think its the only one of the Fault Line books to have a recorded version.

I mean, I can find it easy enough if I want to buy it; but asking for things here is; I dunno..tradition?

A Scanner Darkly makes for good UA fodder. A lot of Phil K. Dick's stuff walks a borderline of being relevant.

If the Trove anon is still around, you can dump your files on 7chan's /tg/. The people in the PDF share thread will clean them.

The Vienna Circle was mass occultism masked under Logical Empiricism. Using the framework of mathematical philosophy, they gathered to piece together scraps of ritual diagrams and mystic pamphlets, working out the nature of the Statosphere. Plato and his Plane of Forms was a start, but it wasn't enough for these budding adepts. Could Godel have formulated the system-self-referential Theorems of Incompleteness if he hadn't realised the power of desire and want? Some postulate that the Vienna Circle remains in some fashion, though whether the original members are still around is a topic of much debate.

>>52814759
I would also like to get my hands on this and I can trade an audiobook of the whole Illuminatus Trilogy if someone needs an incentive.

If you put 100 dollars worth of change into a vending machine and press the button to get your change back you'll obtain 140 dollars worth of change back.