Axis Mundi: GM Summary

UA SESSIONS TO DATE:

What has gone before ....

Hugh has been hired by one Amylin Hart to find out what happened to her mom, Laura. It transpired that Laura visited her mom at work (Grandma's Learning Centre) and had glowing reviews by customers. Apparently her mom raised her hand to hit Laura for driving drunk and then stated, "It's gone. It's all gone," and became irresponsive.

she was taken to Ravenshead Correctional Facility and placed under the care of one Dr. Jeremy Munroe (who transferred her to their country estate, Smithy Acres (aka Shitty Acres) and has refused to let Amylin see her mother at all. The walmart cashier has paid Hugh what she can to try and figure out what is going on, but his one trip to Shitty Acres just reveals what looks like, for a moment, an angel wrapped in chains in one of the windows of the walled house. The staff inform Hugh over the intercom that he has to make arrangements with Dr. Munroe for a visit.

According to Hugh's acquaintance, Dennis (who maintains his website) someone spent two hours trying to hack into it that evening; the why remains unknown, and Hugh decides Dr. Munroe in the morning.

Meanwhile, Jackson has finished a shift at work. Gustavo the butcher has left early and Vera and he close up, though Vera cutting up meat makes Jackson feel uneasy, as though she's listening to the echoes of some distant song. He leaves work and spots one spanish kid spraypainting garbage bins (with 'No babies!!!') and arrives at his apartment building to learn some ex-military man (Isiaha) has moved in and Sean -- across the hall -- has finished a counselling session with a thin 20-something named Snake. Snake takes one look at Jackon and runs off down the hall for reasons unknown.

Inside the apartment Thalia has been in her wheelchair watching PBS. They talk for a time and the girl next door, Mary-Anne Throckmorton, comes over with her autistic son Stanley. As usual, Stanley latches onto Thalia and watched her curiuously as the adults talk and eat; Stanley is =having a good spell though Mary-anne misses the nice lady at the one Learning Centre she takes Stanley to who seems to have retired. Stanley reluctantly goes home later.

The next day Hugh goes to visit Dr. Munroe, who produces a raw egg from his desk and breaks it with a hammer to demonstrate the frailty of the human psyche and why it would be dangerous for Laura Hart to see her daughter. Hugh asks about second opinions only to be told by Jeremy Munroe that:
"I am afraid I cannot release any case files due to confidentiality; I could release them to another doctor if Amylin requested such, but said doctor would be operating under the same penumbra of what is best for the patient," with an emphasis on patient. "I know it must be hard for Amylin to have no idea when her mother will get better." He offers up a washed-out smile. "It is rather difficult to try to explain to someone that their mother may well be cured when she stops being her mother."

Jackson head to work and feels himself being watched when he finished, ducking into the local Waffle House to find it was Snake, the boy he somehow spooked earlier. Snake claims to be in the business of buying and selling information and offers up, for food and coffee, that Jackson has a very weird aura and he thinks he knows what Thalia really is. He once saw someone to an exorcism in reverse, their heasd filled with fire, calling something foul into the world and he things that whatever happened to Thalia is like that.

Hugh has dinner with Tiff, his sometime-gf, which turns out nice and normal.

The next day is a Friday and ... a new session! Dr. Munroe is supposed to contact Hugh about meeting Laura Hart and Jackson is hoping Snake doesn't sell informatio about him and Thalia to the highest bidder.

Axis Mundi: less than unknown

Aka session times and such. Ken is on board, with PC done, and Caltak has had one session*.
For the remainder of this week sessions (defined as starting after 6 pm PST) can be: Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday. Possibly Sunday night as well.  Ideally one of those nights will be Ken's intro session on his own.
Next week: Tuesday, Wednesday, possibly Friday. After xmas I have the 27th and 28th entirely free, nights free after that.

Schedules in the new year can be determined by everyone and work from there. Ideally we should try for at least one session a week with the PCs together and such and figure stuff out from there. The PCs differing talents, skills and allies should ideally lead to them needing each other's help but we shall see how it all plays out :)

Axis Mundi clarification

A few clarifications on the setting:

The idea of the City (and by extension the world in general) is that the pretense of schools for Adepts is tossed right out the window: each adept masters different tricks, makes their own and few of them even consider their stuff the 'same' as that of someone else. Oh, the power might come from the same general impulse but the execution of it, the meaning of it, is what matters. Further to that, a lot of Avatar-touched people exist, ones who have Channelled something bigger than themselves at least once and fled it, never understood it, embraced it or so forth.

The New Inquisition and the like don't exist, as there is no one really In The Know. It's not much an Occult Underground as an Occult Ghetto with a lot of people with competing ideas and theories squirrelled away in their own lives. It takes the idea that no one knows what is really going on and ramps that up a notch: the people who understand how the markets really work aren't going to share those secrets with others, the person who has discovered that they can get more than just a good feeling when they cut themselves will hide it due to guilt and shame. And so on.

That government agencies have probably pieced some things together is inevitable -- though what, if anything, they do about it would be a question of time and budget.  Various religions have some idea what is going on in the world, at least as it applies to their limited paradigm and there is one npc group who have some small clue about avatars but know little about adepts as those worlds seldom interact directly.

Given the nature of PCs to learn and ferret out information, this can make the PCs pretty Important, if they so choose, or the knowledge can send them running away from the game entirely to become bee keepers in Peoria.

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.