Proposed small UA Campaign

UA Campaign: axis mundi inveniendum

Premise: The world is weirder than we want to know.

The world is pretty strange. A casual look at the news can prove that, when you have political parties holding the global economy hostage, American Idol getting more votes than the last major election, random killing sprees, the inexplicable popularity of certain celebrities and so forth. The worst part about this is that the world is even weirder than that.

Because there's a kid who cut himself once and had the cuts talk to him, people who see auras, ways to masturbate and see the face of God, a babysitter who has never once had a kid back-talk her. Weird things, on the fringes of the world, that are somehow part of something that would be more comforting if it were alien. And this has touched you: perhaps you saw something once, or did something, or sometimes when no one is looking, you can make ice cream all fat-free.

As far as you know, it's just you. Oh, there's stories about other things, but the world is full of urban legends (not that you'd ever think yourself one) and for the most part your life is normal. Until other things happen, and you realize that there is a secret underbelly to the world, an odd place of power and will and desire so strong it can change reality. A world you can become part of, at a cost.

Theme: Life vs power.

You have a normal life, with normal friends, family, a job. And then there's this other world, where people can be more than people, where men and women can whistle up things from shadows or cut someone with a smile or sing songs that no human has ever known. It's not just weird, not at all: there's power to be found in symbols, in the real truth of the world, in the manipulation of reality and collective will. Magick exists, and gods within us all, but to become part of that, to be power in the world, might mean giving up all you hold dear.

Power requires a touch of madness to be genius, and the real world has little truck with this kind of genius.

GM Notes:

The basic concept is a slow-burn UA campaign where the PCs become aware of the deeper and wider world that exists within the one they've lived in all their lives. It offers glamour and power and glory, but all at terrible costs. You can get what you want, if you are willing to sacrifice everything else to get it. It's about how the PCs balance their normal life with this world, madness with sanity and how they try and keep it all from crumbling about around them.

Essentially, the PCs begin below Street Level, in UA terms. You're just people with some odd secret, the same as everyone else in the world. Until that secret becomes useful to people who have become more – or less – than people and their world begins to invade yours, full of alien omens and weird abilities and freaks who've become hypersane. It's about how the characters try to adjust to this and deal with the demands of the weird shit world and the normal world.

Imagine you tried your hand at reading tea leaves and managed some good BS about people's futures in it. Now imagine someone revealed that you weren't reading futures but making them and they had a specific future in mind for someone, a knife, and pointed out you didn't need all your fingers. You get away, in the end, but the world is no longer what it used to be, and you can't pretend it is: a veil has been ripped aside, you can see what the real powers and forces that shape the world are and some of them can see you as well. There's something in your eyes now, something deep and half-wild you have no words for and the ground under your feet never felt as unreal as it does now.

Final note: This is a UA game somewhat to the side of the normal rules, in that it's more about avatars than anything else. Not every avatar of the Mother will have the same power, not every adept will use a school of magick in the same way (or have access to the same tricks from it), and a lot of people have one foot into the weird and have to decide to jump in, tread water or get the hell out of dodge. You're one of these people.

Because you're a regular joe with friends, family and a life, and giving that all up can't be worth it. Can it?


Setting


The city, somewhere on east coast north america. It's cold, wet and raining when it's not freezing, the sun baking it brown for two months before more rain slides into the cold of winter once again. The kind of place that's full of promise that few ever kind and the rain never quite washes away all the grime from the streets, where it only takes a single block to walk from mansions to slums, where everyone is crowded together but no one knows their neighbours.

It can be cold and hard, at times, but the same is true of everywhere: the city has wild parks and subdivisions done up in varying styles, century-old hotels nestled next to condos built from an Ikea catalogue. The ice cream vans still come, the factories haven't all closed their jobs thanks to China and most of the kids play in the streets under the watchful eyes of parents It's not all bad, and not all good: like most places, the city is what you make of it and what it makes of you.