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After you read Unknown Armies, everything you see becomes Unknown Armies. The Colbert Report ripping on O'Reily becomes a an upstart challenging the old Godwalker of the Demagogue. Wikileaks becomes a platform for the attempted ascension of the Anonymous Whistleblower. The old guy who comes into your local diner every day, pays in lint, mutters about the dogs he's seen, and gets coffee and a bagel becomes a burnt out Urbanomancer.
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May 22, 2010 05:23
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I think that, while perhaps not as innovative and completely groundbreaking as Unknown Armies in terms of setting and magic systems, REIGN deserves a lot of props for its incorporation of social fu on a really sophisticated level. REIGN has a brilliant streamlined system for making tactical and social prowess of characters matter and be reflected in combat. edit: It is also pretty much the best system for the "training the peasants" part of a Seven Samurai plot. Impermanent fucked around with this message at 03:49 on May 26, 2010 |
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May 26, 2010 03:02
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TouretteDog posted:Write something quick up about it? It's been a year or two since I've read through it, but I don't remember anything special about the social skills from it except the usual mechanics of gobble dice breaking sets, with optional yelling at the start of combat to scare away grunts. The company system is actually what I was referring to, and I'll go ahead and give a brief rundown from my admittedly not-great grasp of the rules: Companies are groups of people working together for a common goal, which can be as simple as "live a peaceful life as a peasant village" and as complex as "Become the ultimate coffee shop chain." They are rated in various qualities (Treasure, Might, Influence, Territory) which go from being crap in a bucket to being the ultimate examples of that quality. The peasant village might have a lovely might because they're a bunch of peasants, no influence, and negligible territory, but if they're all incredible devotees of the fish-god of the village, they might have a very high Sovereignty. Some of these are useful when others might not be. Might is great when you're dealing with military forces, but Sovereignty is going to keep you from going to the dogs when spies whisper treason into your village (or company or terror cell or boy scout troupe.) Your characters all will/should have some kind of skill that makes them good at dealing with a particular aspect of managing a company. A merchant-type can make your funds stretch and do backflips. A tactician and leader can keep your army informed and on top. And a socialite can keep your people happy and spread dissension through those who oppose you. Companies can do all sorts of things to other companies, from warfare to trade to espionage, and each kind of attack can be done in different ways. A raid will use your might to damage their treasure, a symbolic attack will damage their sovereignty, etc. Finally: your PCs can do Unconventional Warfare, which is doing stuff that PCs do best: slaughtering villages, assassinating leaders, stealing macguffins, poisoning wells... any terrorist act you can think of. In short: Companies are collections of stats that represent some tangible group of people bent on some goal, like a religious sect or even a specific, heretical sect of a religious sect. They can meaningfully interact with other companies and be given bonuses on these rolls from the PC abilities' and the players' quick thinking. The whole of the system comes together to meaningfully and quickly render the interaction of very large groups of people and nation-wide events in a way that can either be the focus of a whole session for players who enjoy strategic level thinking and political intrigue, or as a brief period of planning before dashing off into an enemy stronghold for players who want to get it all out of the way so they can start bashing in heads. This is what I meant by social and tactical prowess being reflected in combat: Not necessarily one on one combat (although I believe some social skills have some mechanical use in combat. Both in scaring off Unworthy Opponents and rattling Worthy Opponents)
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May 26, 2010 07:15
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UrbanLabyrinth posted:Okay, so I've just gotten my hands on a copy of Unknown Armies, and I'm curious: Wouldn't the system just cause more instances of "The Wizard Problem"? Not in the 'the character is powerful enough to do anything that everyone else can combined' sense, but in the 'the game becomes all about the caster and what they need to do to get power' sense. The Wizard Issue is about spotlight time. Unknown Armies works with this by giving each character Passions and Obsessions. By default, each character is supposed to be overwhelmingly interested in something and be all about giving the world a middle finger just to get it. Adepts take this a little further than anyone else, your sessions aren't all going to revolve around the Cliomancer a major charge unless the rest of the group wants it. Further, a lot of adepts' major charge goals can work well with more mundane goals. If you've got a gun-obsessed dude who wants to see how big a statement a bullet can make, a nigh-sociopathic people pleaser with a flair for the dramatic, and a magey Cliomancer adept obsessed with presidential shenanigans, all of their obsessions can easily line up. (Let's talk the president into placing gun-dude as the department of homeland sec., get him to blow him up, and then have the Cliomancer harvest the charge in order to XYZ) In fact, they most likely need to. Adepts can't use magic to generate their own charges. They need people who aren't broken, miserable cusses to help them further their own goals. This can sound a bit like ROLEPLAYING! But the obsessions and passions are hardcoded into the system. And Adepts are going to be really, really useless in any function that requires the PCs to act like normal human beings (Your PCs may not act like normal human beings anyway. If that's the case, start hitting them with Madness checks until they learn the meaning of sociopath protagonist.) As far as Avatars go, the picture is different. It's pretty easy to keep avatars low-key early on, but they start becoming the center of the spotlight once they start doing their high-level shenanigans. (Of course, by this time everybody will have a hand or two deep in the supernatural) Even then, to be a mover and shaker at that level without any supernatural ability at that point requires a person who's so driven that they demand the storyline move around them. If you can browse a copy of The New Inquisition, take a look at Alex Abel et al. to see how truly scary the normals are in UA.
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Jun 8, 2010 08:02
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Evil Mastermind posted:Well, bear in mind that Alex Abel almost ascended to the Clergy (as a still unknown archetype) without realizing it, but was cockblocked by Dermot Arkane (the Heisenberg Messenger and Avatar of Fox News). I'm never going to get over how great the Clergy are for explaining politics and the crazy dramas of the political and public news world. I talked about this in my first post in this thread, but I want to keep talking about it. In the UA campaign book (which I'm only going to spoil very, very lightly because it already has been in this thread) there's a war goin' on, essentially, between two godwalkers. One of them is the Heisenberg Messenger, which is trying to ascend as the new incarnation of the Messenger. Instead of being merely a teller of the truth, the Heisenberg Messenger slightly changes the meaning or implications of anything he says. With the Heisenberg Messenger in charge, nothing we hear is ever faithful to the source, because we cannot help but change it slightly. Further, most Avatars of the Heisenberg Messenger are going to be consummate spin-doctors, and have to always alter fact to suit theory. Sound familiar? But it doesn't end there - the easiest way to generate a whole slew of UA campaign ideas is to take a look at any long-running political feud. You can (you may not WANT to) read the recent rise of Wikileaks' journalism and Anonymous' splinter crusade against thetans as a war against the Demagogue and the Heisenberg Messenger by a third archetype. It could be Anonymous if you're feeling especially prone to being an immature jerk online today, but it could also the The Grey Suits, the Anonymous Whistleblower, or the Hooded Man. where do you and your players' sympathies lie? Is it better to be aiding the force of misinformation and misleading slander from named individuals, or do they work for the cause of mob rule and the protection of anonymity that helps whistleblowers, attention-seeking firestarters, and violent racists? Or, and this is the most fun option, do they gradually piece together their own response? * There are a lot of fanmade Avatars posted on the UA fansite, and something like 90 percent of them are crap. Usually, when it's not because the writers didn't understand the game at all, were busy being in-jokey, or were some combination of drunk, high or autistic, it's because they were too specific. An avatar needs to be something akin to a Jungian archetype - broad enough that you can think of personal, legal, military, and social incarnations of the same avatar. The True King is a good example of an archetype from the books that seems very specific but isn't. Most people are going to create the True King of whatever city their game takes place in, because that's the obvious way to do things, but you could also have a True King of the Chicago Cubs, (whose land would be the Cubs' stadium, and whose followers might be fans, the players, and the coach, if the King isn't the coach) a True King of the Local Gaming Store, or a True King of an Internet Messageboard (which would require some adjudication as to what counts as his land, but c'mon.) The bottom line is, an Avatar usually best thought of as their primary verb. The True King leads. The Warrior fights, the Executioner hunts, the Mother nurtures.
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Jun 8, 2010 22:22
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Robotic Folksinger posted:Okay. I have bought REIGN, and am having a blast creating random characters. You don't need the splats. The Avatars and Adepts in the core + cherrypicked ones from the UA fansite should be enough. The ones in the core are in the core because they are easily the most flavorful and good jumping off points for homebrew. ON THE OTHER HAND: the splats are fantastic, and if you WANT them they're quite good. Greg Stolze talks about what he liked and didn't like about them here: http://www.gregstolze.com/atlas.html
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Jun 9, 2010 03:50
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Save Russian Jews posted:Why would you do this. He's an Adept.
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May 24, 2011 06:37
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I'd love to see the new mechanomancy variant powered by the fetishization of science as a route to power that simultaneously exalts and denigrates the object of fetishization. Gluing gears on to a tophat demonstrates simultaneously an overwhelming love for Progress while also understanding approximately zero of the social or scientific relevance of the industrial age.
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Oct 31, 2014 20:43
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Sometimes it is very worthwhile to trade the power of flight for the power of attorney.
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Nov 5, 2014 17:06
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UA also now includes, almost verbatim, that modern Japanese urban legend of the scissor lady.
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Apr 3, 2016 19:24
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You can make a school out of almost anything, thanks to the new advice on making schools up front in in the first book. That's one of my favorite improvements to the system in the new edition. The emphasis on rolling your own schticks will make new schools easier to balance. I think a major school that hasn't been touched on yet is the YouTuber adept that gains charges from posting entirely inane bullshit to social media websites.
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Apr 7, 2016 05:05
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Paladins work in d&d groups just fine, this isn't too different. You just have to find reasons as a group why this nut should work with the rest of your nuts. One thing is that adepts aren't ever really unaware of their Magick, so they need to know that they're pulling the universe around them occasionally. They can definitely think that it is the rightness of their cause, not the force of their belief, that channels their Magick, but they need to know they're doing it. Otherwise they're unconscious avatars. Furthermore, like adepts tend to attract like. What does their subculture look like and how do they interface with the rest of magical society. What does a very clued-in venturomancer look like? I think it's a really fun concept and I might wind up statting one later. Spells: x minor But Thou Must! Give someone a noble or at least neutral but in your favor request, and make them roll a self check of they refuse it. Badass scar: x minor Retroactively cause an injury to have been less severe. My plane is about to take off, more later. Maybe a spell that makes forces someone you've designated a villain to monologue.
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May 31, 2016 02:18
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His visibility may suffer because he is neither just an indie developer nor a huge name in the biggest sellers, but rather a person who goes from individual project to indivdiual project being extremely excellent. I always think of Kenneth Hite when people bring up Greg as another strong designer with no real celebrity status. (Although I think Greg is much more prolific and probably better at mechanics.)
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Oct 24, 2016 19:42
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Seems to me more that the confessor would, instead of absolving people of their sins by listening to them, go around and tell people the pain of the world until they break under its weight.
Impermanent fucked around with this message at 00:40 on Feb 10, 2017 |
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Feb 9, 2017 23:37
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smelly rear end dude whose pants always fit weird and only ever pays for poo poo in freshly printed Krona is a winning minor UA npc at any rate.
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Apr 20, 2017 21:08
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Whoever the current Messenger is, they've done a great job protecting themselves the past couple years. Snowden, Assange, etc. seem to have all failed in their attempts to usurp the archetype. I don't think, also, that a Mother archetype could necessarily drop a plane on a Mother godwalker while she was even around a child. It could go even deeper. Could the Mother archetype be the Mother and kill a Mother protecting any child? or even just mourning over the grave of her dead child? Executioners, similarly, wouldn't ever need to fear being killed by their own archetype - provided no one else gives that their archetype a reason to kill them. Not that they couldn't work against an irksome godwalker in a dozen ways, but "plane drop" is sort of uninspired and lazy.
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May 3, 2017 22:25
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the new school is wargamers who charge off of recreating events as historically accurately as they possibly can in different war game systems. You get a major by playing a game about an ongoing conflict that models it accurately as it happens. (Or maybe that's what you do with a major charge?) The taboo is that you can never de-escalate conflict. The random magick domain is about causing feelings, events, and action to recur, but changing their context.
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May 16, 2017 16:02
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avatars are the ones that have to respect human belief. Adepts are about hosed up idiosyncratic individuals with hella obsessive paradigms who don't give a gently caress that no one else thinks watching anime is the gateway to the Divine Eternal. The reason schools fall is because the external circumstances that give rise to their paradox collapses.
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May 16, 2017 17:45
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I think just about anything Alan Resnick has done is probably a good hook for unknown armies. Live forever as you are now is definitely about the person who used to be the Executioner. Unedited footage of a bear is just a particularly nasty ritual. This house has people in it is a perfect unknown armies version of a haunted house story.
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May 29, 2017 04:46
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Yeah Alan tutorial is about a fool avatar getting stuck in a room of renunciation.
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May 29, 2017 04:52
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Kestral posted:I just watched "This House Has People In It" after having never heard of Alan Resnick, and holy poo poo. Can anyone recommend more media along those lines, whatever you happen to feel "those lines" are? its also important that you know, and i'm trying to say this with as few spoilers as possible, that watching that video is the smallest amount of interaction you can have with this house has people in it. google or sleuth your way into easily 16x more content if you found it really captivating.
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Jun 1, 2017 18:47
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Freaking Crumbum posted:like sure, if THHPII was just its own thing it'd be weird and unsettling and cool, but the more detail that gets developed around the central video makes the central video safer, somehow. no matter how weird the other details are or try to be, they start building a pattern and that completely deflates the initial mystery, for me. THHPII: the nice thing about the THHPII extended universe is that while certain questions are answered, they are only answered with more questions. You get more detail, but never more clarity. Like the fake disease the family is scared of having? Never 100% if its real, or if that pink monster has anything to do with it. UFoaB: as far as I can tell, they learned from the tendency to oversteer into creating more details in the elements around this one. The only things you learn can be reasonably surmised by reading into the subtext of the actual video.
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Jun 6, 2017 18:27
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UA in japan needs to cover: hikikomori, non-meat eating men, suicide groves, hard gay, paper cranes, the scissor lady. lot of good stuff in japan.
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Sep 20, 2017 06:47
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