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So has anyone else noticed that the core systems of UA 3rd are surprisingly adaptable, setting-wise? Like, I can see how with some minor tweaking, you could strip them out of the 'urban fantasy' genre and pop them into a 'weird post-apocalypse' genre or even outright fantasy - it'd need to be a somewhat grounded fantasy, and you'd need to come up with new magickal schools/archetypes (though a fair few of the archetypes would work as-is, too, which I suppose is kind of the point of them). I'm talking specifically about the meters/general skills and the identities, which frankly are pretty portable to just about any setting.
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May 12, 2023 08:52
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I did that a couple weeks ago. It's easy enough when all you have to do is balance a handful of pregens against each other. Building a whole setting specific spell list with new schools would be a lot more work. The metaphysics of the Avatar system are hard to transplant, but it's not necessary to do so because Godwalkers and the Invisible Clergy rarely matter in UA anyway. Adhere to a code of conduct, get powers, everything else is superfluous.
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May 12, 2023 18:24
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FrozenGoldfishGod posted:So has anyone else noticed that the core systems of UA 3rd are surprisingly adaptable, setting-wise? Like, I can see how with some minor tweaking, you could strip them out of the 'urban fantasy' genre and pop them into a 'weird post-apocalypse' genre or even outright fantasy - it'd need to be a somewhat grounded fantasy, and you'd need to come up with new magickal schools/archetypes (though a fair few of the archetypes would work as-is, too, which I suppose is kind of the point of them). I'm talking specifically about the meters/general skills and the identities, which frankly are pretty portable to just about any setting.
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May 13, 2023 01:45
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mellonbread posted:I did that a couple weeks ago. It's easy enough when all you have to do is balance a handful of pregens against each other. Building a whole setting specific spell list with new schools would be a lot more work. Yes, that's how divine magic works in 99% of games that feature it. The gods don't care what you think or believe, just what you do in the moment.
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May 13, 2023 10:28
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UA's my go-to for parlor larps for that reason
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May 13, 2023 11:53
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It could do pretty well moved to other real-world historical periods as well. The design problem there is that the premise of the game is "effect change in the world through magick" and you'd have a hard time stopping players from exploiting actual present-day knowledge to bring about a specific alternate history outcome. (Which is in itself a potentially fun game, but would need to be about that and it will get silly if they know a lot more about the world than their characters are supposed to)
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May 13, 2023 12:47
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Guildencrantz posted:It could do pretty well moved to other real-world historical periods as well. The design problem there is that the premise of the game is "effect change in the world through magick" and you'd have a hard time stopping players from exploiting actual present-day knowledge to bring about a specific alternate history outcome. (Which is in itself a potentially fun game, but would need to be about that and it will get silly if they know a lot more about the world than their characters are supposed to) You can work with this. Make the characters from the modern day but somehow sent back in time through occult weirdness, into an already-altered history. If they want to get home they have to use magick to mold this timeline into the "real" one they know.
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May 13, 2023 19:15
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If you're set on forcing the players to roleplay a specific historical scenario rather than doing what they please, you need to give them a crop of pregens that are all hooked into the story you want to tell. Like Hellenistic Era Troy or The Sino Japanese War
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May 16, 2023 18:27
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So most people who read this thread are probably aware, but in case you aren't: Greg Stolze's latest kickstarter for Terminarion Shock is struggling to fund. It's the "design your own spacecraft for play" book so I'm really hoping it makes it, and it has add ons if you want to pick up rhe whole line for a song. Greg's "here's the neat thing I want to make" approach really helped crowdfunding gain traction in the RPG space, but has struggled in the newer, stupider landscape these days. I hope this one makes it!
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Jun 9, 2023 14:18
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Termination shock is a really weird name for a game. It feels like someone’s reaction to being fired.
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Jun 9, 2023 16:12
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It's a reference to https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heliosphere, which is a big setting element in the game
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Jun 9, 2023 17:02
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LaSquida posted:So most people who read this thread are probably aware, but in case you aren't: Greg Stolze's latest kickstarter for Terminarion Shock is struggling to fund. He really needed to put up at least another post on Different Trouble or any posts at all on the original Termination Shock KS. That's like, the audience most likely to give you more money. I backed Different Trouble and totally missed the update. Echophonic fucked around with this message at 17:32 on Jun 9, 2023 |
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Jun 9, 2023 17:30
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What's the system for Termination Shock anyway?
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Jun 14, 2023 21:31
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Strange Matter posted:What's the system for Termination Shock anyway? Custom. You get three stats for basically social, combat, and doing tech stuff. Its design intent is to provide equal mechanical support to all three phases of the game. It looks like it succeeds. Someone should F&F it, I've been meaning to but just haven't gotten around to it.
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Jun 14, 2023 23:31
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Strange Matter posted:What's the system for Termination Shock anyway? It's kind of weird. You have three stats that each get assigned a different die and you roll all three of them anyway when testing stuff (so the odds of success are pretty much universally constant). However, the die with the worst result defines which stats were responsible for failure/success - so for example if if your Energy (the forcefulness stat) is your smallest die, your failures will be more often flavored as you being hesitant or overpowered and the successes will generally go to other stats. The mechanically important bits of the character sheet are basically perks that proc off success or failure with a given stat - this can be direct numbers-meddling like "if you were about to miss with a gun when Energy is lowest, reroll a die" or, more often, some crit effect like "if your shot didn't have Energy as the weaksauce stat, you can damage a second target".
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Jun 15, 2023 00:40
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So I'm going to be running Unknown Armies 3E for the first time, and I'd be happy to have some kibitzing on my plans. I think I get corkboarding? The premise of the campaign is literally just the plot of In the Mouth of Madness but it's about getting the manuscript to The Winds of Winter from George R. R. Martin*. Would it be better to plunk that down as a one giant objective or to split it up into more bite sized objectives? We'll see what my players want in session 0 in terms of length, but I was going to at least pitch it at them as having a chunk before they get to Santa Fe and things pop off for real. I figure at least a session or two just to let as all get the rules internalized and work out any mechanical kinks, solve some initial mysteries to on-road them for later, ominous portents, etc. Am I just describing milestones but in a dumb, wordy manner? The rest of corkboarding I feel confident in, it's basically what I just do in session 0s generally, but I don't want to gently caress up objectives on the first try. *Yes, there's going to be a scene in a bakery where he whispers "Did I ever tell you my favorite sweet was... lemoncakes?" and suddenly the place is suffused with the yellow glow of citrusy baked goods. It's the single mandatory station on an otherwise collaborative railroad and I will not be stopped, can not be stopped.
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Jul 25, 2023 23:00
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That sounds like a single objective, either local or weighty depending on how important you believe the unpublished novel is in the grand scheme of things. Bite sized adventures that contribute to the success of the overall scheme are handled via UA3's milestone system. Your proposed investigative introduction could be a series of petty milestones, or a single intense milestone depending on how you want to spread out table time. According to Book Two, you're supposed to just hand out milestones when the players accomplish something that contributes to mission success. I've run one campaign and played in five, and in all of those we premade a list of milestones after we finished corkboarding. The GM chipped in a couple and then vetted suggestions from the players on things they wanted to do to accomplish the objective. This is helpful because
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Jul 26, 2023 06:40
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O okay. Cool. Thanks a mill. Sometimes the loosey-goosier parts of systems make me worry about doing things "wrong" because they're a bit unspecified. While I caught you, you got anything I should be on the look-out for mechanically? The system looks pretty put-together, in many ways better than 2e, but you can never really tell until you get it to the table. Off hand, my worries are mechanically filling out the GMCs quickly and that the grid-iron system, while flexible, is pretty anemic mechanically. The first I'm just gonna throw prep-time at, and the latter I was going to just be quick about it and keep the focus on the narrative. These sound reasonable from your experience? Also, I have not purchased books 4 and 5 and probably won't unless a player specifically wants a mechanical widget from there. Which is a shame, because your F&F's were one of the big reasons I'm running the system. I don't remember anything particularly helpful in there, but if you do please feel free to remind me. Thanks again, hoss.
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Jul 26, 2023 16:58
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Xiahou Dun posted:While I caught you, you got anything I should be on the look-out for mechanically? The system looks pretty put-together, in many ways better than 2e, but you can never really tell until you get it to the table. Off hand, my worries are mechanically filling out the GMCs quickly and that the grid-iron system, while flexible, is pretty anemic mechanically. The first I'm just gonna throw prep-time at, and the latter I was going to just be quick about it and keep the focus on the narrative. These sound reasonable from your experience? Not every NPC needs to be fully statted from the starting gun. Aside from their utility as roleplay prompts the passions mostly matter because of the coercion minigame, and the players aren't necessarily going to try that on everyone they meet. Hardening is a little more important since it determines how NPCs react to stress damage. Especially violence and magick, the two most common sources of SAN damage in UA. Failing SAN in Unknown Armies is an instant freakout, and modeling that with the NPCs is important to sell the impact of the action happening onscreen - and the setting's core conceit that normal people are only ever a single d100 roll away from a riot. Having a blank copy of the character sheet by your side is helpful because you can quickly reference what level an NPC's ability scores should be at based on their hardening, and which abilities attack/defend what meters. I think UA3 had a GM screen with the dueling stress meters on it, but I never picked up a copy. When in doubt, just steal an NPC someone else already wrote. The best source for these is Oddities and Endlings. That's the second best resource I can point you at for the game, after the unnoficial SRD at On Armies Unknown Book 5 has the "iconic" caster schools that people who have not played UA might recognize. Epideromancy, Pornomancy, Entropomancy. I think these are generally better than the Adepts in Book 1. The Book 1 Avatars are largely fine, and the Unique Supernatural rules are one of the best "power creation" systems I've seen in an RPG.
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Jul 26, 2023 17:46
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Yeah, I was gonna have specific NPCs statted out, a pile of general person-does-X for things like cops, some various stripes of gribblies and then a blank character sheet as a prompt for free-wheeling. You’ve been a mensch and half, super helpful. Thanks yet again.
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Jul 26, 2023 18:20
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mellonbread posted:The idea with the Claim of the Clergy is that you can come up with your own Claims of the Clergy for the other Avatar Channels in the book, or from Unknown Armies generally. The obvious pull is a Claim for the Avatar of the Mother, at the prehistoric cult site in Malta where they found all those MILF statues. A roadhouse where True King Dion Isaacs held bloodrites with his biker gang, the sauna where a drunken Savonian sweated herself into Godhood as the Shaman… Of course the challenge is coming up with special buffs for all these locations to apply to pilgrims.
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Aug 3, 2023 17:10
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Lichtenstein posted:It's kind of weird. You have three stats that each get assigned a different die and you roll all three of them anyway when testing stuff (so the odds of success are pretty much universally constant). However, the die with the worst result defines which stats were responsible for failure/success - so for example if if your Energy (the forcefulness stat) is your smallest die, your failures will be more often flavored as you being hesitant or overpowered and the successes will generally go to other stats. The stats also line up with the three domains of combat, social, and doing stuff. It looks like a really solid attempt at making an RPG with equal mechanical weight to all aspects of play. Someone should do an F&F of it, preferably not me, but I'll get to it eventually.
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Aug 6, 2023 05:02
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I'm going to run a short Unknown Armies Halloween writing jam, starting on the 24th. I'll post the instructions then.
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Oct 22, 2023 23:44
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Unknown Armies 2023 Halloween Jam is live. Details in the attached document.
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Oct 24, 2023 16:45
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Love this! Hope to participate, though I make no promises due to the degree to which my brain is undercooked
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Oct 24, 2023 16:57
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Got a long flight home tonight, so plenty of time to look work up some terrible people.
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Oct 24, 2023 21:57
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The jam wrapped last week. We got fourteen submissions, plus three I wrote as an example and three I wrote while the jam was running. I posted my thoughts here. Everyone I talked with after wanted to do more jams and contests, so I'll have to think of something else we can do in the future.
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Nov 6, 2023 18:04
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mellonbread posted:The jam wrapped last week. We got fourteen submissions, plus three I wrote as an example and three I wrote while the jam was running. I posted my thoughts here. Everyone I talked with after wanted to do more jams and contests, so I'll have to think of something else we can do in the future. Very cool reading. Thanks mellon and all contributors, this has inspired me to get off my arse and finish reading the 3E rules
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Nov 7, 2023 04:30
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DPM posted:Very cool reading. Thanks mellon and all contributors, this has inspired me to get off my arse and finish reading the 3E rules Assorted Pregens for when you need characters fast and don't have time to chew through Unknown Armies' elaborate character/NPC building process. Kurta the Androgyne, a Mystic Hermaphrodite living it up in the Weimar Republic. The Surgeon Bug, an Otherspace angel of death. The Cage Cup, a drinking game set during the Roman Republic's suppression of the Bacchanalia in 186 BC.
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Dec 17, 2023 20:05
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