signum somnia

“Life is about the wrong turns. Down side streets, back alleys, the roads maps won’t admit to having. There are beaten paths people know to avoid, paths through words and worlds not meant for human use. People see weird shit all the time: shadows that don’t seem to be normal, sudden noises where no one is standing, that feeling of being watched even when you’re alone. The thing is, see, there is something. We shape the world, the world we make shapes us. There aren’t words for it. Sometimes there are barely feelings. But if we forget how to unsee things, they are there:

The babysitter no child ever spoke back to, the street bum people treat as if he was a king, the child with the creepy eyes and the smile full of sharpness, the teenager who sliced her own arm and swore blind that her cuts could speak to her, the boy who ran across broken glass without a single injury. We dismiss it as miracles when we see it, but it’s something other. There is a way to bend the world to your desires, to bend yourself to the world, and if you do it – if you can become it – maybe it’s worth it. I don’t know.

“I used to work for a bank. I won’t tell you which one. I took this wrong turn in the open street, met a homeless man in a cardboard box he’d scrawled mathematical symbols on. “To keep the angels of angles away,” he said, as if it made all the sense in the world. I gave him ten dollars because his eyes were so worn out. Ran into him across town two days later, a week after that. I started reading his box, God help me. It was there. The rise and fall of stock markets, predicted a week in advance, all scrawled out on a cardboard box.

“He had friends, took me to meet them. I followed. I couldn’t not follow. Hook, line, sunk. There were twelve of them, no idea what they were doing, predicting the future on cardboard. I added a few lines, just – well, honestly, just because. I won’t say what happened. I had to quit, accused of insider trading. I never met him after that. But I have my own box now. I’m inventing my own math. I think I can do it, if I forget enough – get my life back, I mean. I don’t know. I just need two bucks, for a new Sharpie. I could make you famous. Two lines. That’s all I need to write.

“It’ll last until it rains on my box. I wish I was lying. You should go. If you look too hard, if you pay attention – just go. It’s safer. It’s safe. I don’t know if I want safe again.”

Signum Somnia [Signal Dreams] is a street-level Unknown Armies campaign set in Sinal City, a sprawling metropolis of skyscrapers and slummed ringed by suburban nightmares where dreams go to die. The city is old and run-down. Think Detroit but with a population that’s more New York melting pot. The city isn’t a bankrupt ruin, but some can see it from where you are – and others are doing their damnedest to prevent that. Things fall apart, but some centres can hold. People can make a difference, even if it is in ways – and by means – that they never knew.

System notes: Standard 220 point UA character creation (poke Sparkie for a sheet). Adept schools won’t exist; it’s very much more that each adept does their own thing – some adepts of one school will know one spell, some another, each approach it in different ways. Avatars are more powerful, though quietly so. Regardless, one is still bound to a system (taboos) or a paradigm (adepts) and normal people are not.

A lot more weird than flat-out horror. People with odd talents, genuine psychic shit, people with just some odd/strange knack and the like exist. The PCs may number among them or they may not. Artifacts exist and are pretty damn weirdly dangerous (think The Lost Room) and people know a lot more than they ever admit. The world is chock-a-block full of the weird and the ways people deal and cope with it. If you’re a PC, you deal with it by becoming part of it, by grabbing the tiger by the tail and using it for your own ends, however mundane or glorious they may be.

Setting notes: the game is conceived as being more occult ghetto than underground; the internet has only helped the spread of dis- and misinformation and for every person with a cell phone pic of weird shit there’s a dozen others with photoshop and too much time on their hands. Everyone is stumbling in the dark, but some people are stumbling in the right direction.

Characters: Street-level UA. You have a trigger event(s) in your background, you may be a bit weird or have run into weird but you’re not wandering about leaping in front of cars to juice yourself up with power. At least, not yet. Keep in mind that the PCs need goals and aspiration and what separates PCs from NPCs is often that PCs do go out and get stuff done. Most of the world sees weird stuff and flees to their local church or a psychiatrists office: you buck up and deal with it. However you do. Skills should be less generic and more fitting into the tone of your character and what they'd do with them.

(Friends and family are both encouraged and useful in the same. Give the GM plot-fodder and he will be happy. So will Sparkie.)

Campaign: The world will be built based around the PCs, given the characters and NPCs you make. MSG me/each other with stuff you want/don’t want to see and the game shall build itself around all of that. The core of the campaign is that the PCs are discovering about Weird Shit and doing things about it: they’re learning more about who they are, how the world works and what do do with that knowledge. 

Players: Thus far, Caltak. There will be no set time for sessions, unless players desire it. Time ending up a little weird will be just be one more things for PCs to get used to, after all....