... this worries me

<AlcarGM> "The surgeons were terrified. I had not thought them capable of terror, and yet they hid. The world rang with bells, the floor shuddered. Entire places were -- broken." He tenses, then reaches out to grab your arm.
<Joe`> d100 Dodge 35%
<Sparkie> Joe` d100: 99 Dodge 35%
<Joe`> (( arg, doubles fail ))
* Sparkie kept the 99! SCORE!
<Joe`> (( at least it wasnt a 100 :p ))
............
<AlcarGM> So, last session Sparkie did one roll for chaos. And rolled a 99.
<AlcarGM> <Chaos`^> 1d100
<AlcarGM> <Sparkie> Chaos`^ 1d100: 3
<AlcarGM> <Chaos`^> I'm saving that roll for later
<AlcarGM> <alcar> lol
<AlcarGM> <alcar> I might just allow it, after that 99 :p
<AlcarGM> <Sparkie> WHAT?!?!
<AlcarGM> * Sparkie is going to keep that 99 and use it next session too, then.
* Sparkie is beyond awesome now.
<Joe`> lol

Signum Jot Note: 5 sessions in

Currently we have three players, one dicebot and the game has 5 sessions in the bag. NPCs have been created, the world is slowly getting fleshed out. Characters have made dubious choices (yay!), performed rituals (woohoo!) and begun investigations into scenes of mass murder. As one does. The general idea is that the game will function in more of a slow-burn way rather than, say, 'meet Cthulhu and go mad' way. Everyone makes decisions that seem to make perfect sense and slowly but surely lead them down slippery paths -- and then you do more things, and even more to justify the one you did before and some day look back and have no idea how you came to be who you are.

It should be a wild ride for the players at least, even if the poor PCs might well have cause to disagree.

Sinal City: Notes

Notes for the game inspired by players creations; contributions welcomed. 

          Taxicabs in Sinal City.

Taxis in the city are run by several companies regulated by the mayor’s office.

Sinal Cabs, run by one Damian Dalessio, is the oldest and arguably most famous cab company in the city, famous for its black and white checkered cabs and fact – not boast – that not a single cab has GPS since his drivers know the city inside-outside, able to act as tour guides and supply useful facts as well as the best routes through the city. It takes at least a year of training to be become a cab driver and at least 3/4 of the applicants flunk out.

The company has run into problems lately due to having few vans and having not kept up with having accessible rides and the like, but it is the only company to offer 24-hour cab service and the drivers are well-paid and competent. Sinal Cabs only accept cash payments.

Luxe: No other name. A small fleet of white luxury sedans who offer convenience, exorbitant pricing and special services to most anyone who uses them. They company is filthy rich through not that large as a great deal of profits go into bribing many officials to look the other way over incidents involving their vehicles and/or passengers.

Fleet Street: The yellow taxis of Fleet Street are famous, even though the company is no longer situated on said street in the business district. Fleet cabs are bright yellow, accessible, modern, though the drivers are poorly paid and the turnover rate is high. The owner, one Chiang Yu, recently bought it and has been trying to modernize the company even further by offering delivery of parcels and probably work for the mob, if rumours are to be believed.

Chet’s Cheapike: A bicycle courier service in the city, Chet’s company delivers packages, letters, and sometimes even people on the back of smaller bikes. They have scooters and some motorcycles in their inelegant ensemble and are run cheaply. The company is reportedly near-bankrupt most of the time and Chet is desperate for funding and a way to break into the ‘big leagues’, as he sees taxi companies, as well as prevent any bike sharing scheme from operating in the city.

Minicab Inc. Licensed private vehicles that operate as cabs. A lot of illegal ones exist but there are some legal ones that get to use designated rush-hour lanes and carpooling ones at all hours, the same as actual taxis. The company has come under fire recently for allowing illegal minicabs to function with their blessing.

The black cabs. There are some, reportedly working for some of the high-end clubs and hotels. Black cabs take any passenger, accept different forms of payment and ask no questions. Nothing is known for definite about the company and some claim it is just a rumour certain minicab operators started.

More to be added as needed/warranted. 

Signum Notes

Unknown Armies is, at the core of it, a horror game. It's about the horrible things people do in the pursuit of their goals, and often the equally horrible things that must be done to stop them. That's the horror of it all: what people will do. The weird shit is the setting, the nature of the world the PCs exist in. For Signum, this is the PCs starting off as functionally normal people who exist in the everyday world, who interact easily with normal people. How long the remain that depends on what they do, and why they do it.

Because normal people are crazy. They believe the world is sane, that it's not possible to say "Fuck you" to reality and actually succeed. They don't understand that the world is about you, that you can shape the universe into new shapes, make things happen by dint of luck, effort, and probably some unpleasant memories afterwards, but omelettes and eggs. And if you can do this: what do you do with it? Do you become the horrors, however noble your goals? Do you fight against them and try for any success, no matter how small?


Your character is, effectively, Edward Snowden. You have learned Secrets. You have some idea of how the world really works. You know the mundane explanations are a lie: so what do you do with it? Do you reveal secrets to others, use them for yourself, pretend you never knew and let it eat you away inside? Do you wonder why no one else revealed these secrets? And if you're asking those questions, how far will you go to find answers?

Being a UA PC is about doing the right thing, yes, but it's also about consequences. Always, it's about consequences. What you do, what you're willing to do, and just how far down the rabbit hole of madness you will go to find a perfect sanity.

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....

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. 

Ah, unknown armies

Came across this in my notes for the Apotheosis game:

A collection of fictional books.

The History of Psychology by Tom Cruise
Why Hitler Was a Boddhisatva by the Dalai Lama
The True History of Magick by James Randi
The Autobiography of God (Reader's Digest condensed version)
Voynich Manuscript, translated by Edward Fitzgerald
How I loved My Mother by Sigmund Freud
Shattering of the Glass Family by J D Salinger
The Cruel Ones and You by Dr Seuss
I See With My Other Eyes by Hellen Keller

Apotheosis: 10 sessions in.

(Technically, 9.5. But what the hell, 10 sounds better.)

At present, we have... a cabal!

Current goal: Defeat Ms. Whitman, the psych teacher who claims to be a Bodhisattva and has survived being beaten with a crowbar, removal of her spine and being dumped into a sewer. She's connected to some other world accessible through a suitcase (at the least) and a mysterious Key they've yet to find or locate. The nature of Ms. Whitman and her goals remains a mystery at present, though she claims to want to either enlighten or kill those who killed her in the first place and seems to have returned with preternatural healing, though whether the spider-thing inside her remains is unknown at present.


Members:

Adella: Avatar of the Flying Woman, psychology student, and has an 'in' with a dealer in rituals and occult rumors and lore. Avatars may lack power in the observable sense, but the universe is on her side -- she's once felt infinity itself watch her,and worked a ritual and had it come true.

Delilah: Physics professor and wife to Marcus. She knows a little of the OU, enough to have her own minor trick and to have seen tenebrae before (she believes they're dark matter, and than quantum physics is a lie -- which makes her teaching it quite an interesting experience). She's worried she's in over her head, but the lure of answers to her questions drives her ever onwards.

Marcus: Del's husband; he's mostly playing it cool and keeping cards close to his chest, owing to run-ins with Sleepers and his wife's memory lapse once. Despite having committed no real crime beyond being a drive for a marijuana pickup while demon-possessed, he's the one member of the cabal the police are currently watching.

Nate: A friend with benefits to Adella (one of many). he's still coming to terms with discovering he wasn't ever human and his mechanomancer grandfather seems to have given up most of his memories that could explain why Nate was made, and how he's the product of cbyermancy. So far he's removed one person's spine - by accident - and is trying as hard as he can to act human.

Talnish - mechanical engineering professor and mechanomancer, who has beaten one person with a crowbar (self defense, he says, but whatever makes you sleep at night...) and buried one body dropped on his property outside the city limits as well as seen his dean turn into a giant pig after eating McDonalds. Somehow he's kept his his professorship, but how long that lasts is anyone's guess...

Apotheosis: some news

Your character can discover this in the radio, via the newspaper, on the net, by TV: doesn't really matter how. (They might not even at all; your choice.)

Radio Free Essex:

"This is DJ Arnold, who has never been a DJ but it sounds pretty sweet, on 999 AM. Essex University is the top of the news for the hour, on the hour. Or under it, as the case may be! The top story -- who am I kidding? it's the only one! -- some psych students weren't able to get into a lecture hall so they had a mass orgy outside. Witnesses reported it, and several joined in because it "felt right" according to one witness who did not want to be named. I'd be more worried about STDS, but hey!

"The teacher for the class remains unaccounted for, but if I was Ms. Whitman, I'd be flattered: most students just leave when the teacher isn't present! One teacher, who asked not to be named (this is sort of theme of the news today) said that, while he welcomed a return of 60s style protest activism, campus-wide orgies were a bit much. Students seem divided according to my unofficial poll. A good 50% think it was drugs, like a date rape one or LSD. 25% think it was a protest, or possibly an art piece, and the rest think it is a sign from Satan about the whore of Bablyon and the end times. Well, I guess we all know who they're talking about, even if oficialdom is remaining mum!

"Now it's time for a break with Right Said Fred, and "I"m Too Sexy For My Campus!"


Wessex TV:

"The top story of the morning is the unexplained sexual activity at the university yesterday afternoon. Opinions range widely, but there has been no official report on the cause of the event, nor why a psych class would engage in that kind of experiments. The head of the psychology department, Dr. Robert Dickinson, stated that Professor Whitman had been under a lot of stress lately and that perhaps her dissertation on William Masters had begun to cloud her judgment.

"He further cited a possibly apocryphal story about her teaching practices coming under question since she was rumored to improve grades for studies who would consent to be subjects in her studies and give in-depth accounts of their sexual experiences to date. This no doubt influenced her other classes and led her to have students believe she would give them all at least a B if they engaged in group sex.

"The police are still investigating the situation and Sergeant Leatherwood only said that they had called in the FBI to check for drugs or contaminants in the local water supply. Asked about the possible sightings of Delaware police cruisers, Leatherwood only said that the county had asked for aid and refused to comment further on the matter."


The Rutherford Daily Independent Standard:

Top Story: UNIVERSITY PROTEST
While officials remain silent, rumors about that yesterday afternoon a mass orgy that took place outside a lecture hall abound. Surprisingly, few pictures of it surfaced, and those that were turned into our office were too grainy to be of use.
When questioned, students claimed "The Man" had taken it from them, but refused to explain further, leading to increased worries about drug abuse and immorality on campus. The police have to far refused to comment, but locals have been picketing the university campus and MAGS, an organization claiming to be Mothers Against Group Sex, has taken up emailing the university to demand an explanation. Until one is forthcoming, the story will likely not die.

Other News
Walter McDermott, a janitor at the university, was found murdered in a room at the Super 8 Motel approximately 3 am last night. The police are not releasing details at this time but are requesting anyone with information to come forward at this time.

Barnes & Noble wishes to apologize for their recent promotion of a new book "The True History of Magick by James Randi". Like their recent 'press releases' of "The Cruel Ones and You by Dr Seuss" and "Shattering of the Glass Family by J D Salinger" and "How I loved My Mother by Sigmund Freud" it seems to be the work of a very bored staff member. Strangely, the only titles that were recognized as actual fakes were "The History of Psychology by Tom Cruise" and "Why Hitler Was a Boddhisatva by the Dalai Lama".

A fire in the Walmart photo lab left one staff member hospitalized but no one else harmed this morning. The company and fire marshal are currently investigating.

In more pleasant news, a remake of the Flying Nun is scheduled to begin filming in one of the ghost towns south of Elysium. Since it's still pre-production there is no word on if they're hiring locals.


On the net:
LOL! Did you hear about Sara and the other students??? That's so awesome!! I wish I'd been there!! I bet someone got pictures!!!!

u r all going to burn in hell!

Obviously, there was no 'orgy'. We are university students, and well aware of safe-sex. It's clear that the university is in cahoots with the government in covering up something important. See: the 'police cars', the amount of junk mail everyone gets, the new Tiki Bar at the south end of campus, and economics departments refusal to have a stated opinion on FDR and the conspiracy to bring down his government as all the proof you need that something Big is going down and our corporate masters wish to hide it from us.

You're so full of it. Everyone knows the CFR is connected to at least 6 deans, and they're the ones who really call the shots. And if you believe that, I have an alien corpse to sell you.

Come on you guys! Lets' not fight! INTERNET ORGY EVERYONE!

Apotheosis: 5 sessions in.

So far things are moving ahead at a brisk clip. People have been put into paintings, Sleepers arrived (Well, he was on vacation, but even so), Holes in the fabric of reality leading Somewhere Else creating magickal briefcases and turning professors into monsters of some kind, a magical Key having been discovered, demonic possession, the murder of said professor by two students, a clockwork, and another professor. Oh, and an orgy on a mundane level, along with Marcus proving his love to Delilah by not having sex with Sara.

Characters So Far

PCs
Adella - Free spirited college student who has, of recently, been able to float in the air after sex.
Marcus - husband to Delilah, a mail-order husband with skills he never wants to use again and a Key whose provenance he doesn't understand
Talnish - mechanical engineering professor and Mechanomancer

NPCs
Delilah - Physics professor and wife to Marcus, locally considered a 'witch'.
Nate - Friend with benefits for Adella who seems to be a post-post modern automaton who was entirely unaware of that until recently.
Sara - Sex-loving room mate to Adella whose life seems to revolve entirely around sex. Also, apparently hunted by Sleepers.

Other Cast
Martin Caidin Sr. - Nate's grandfather. Known to Talnish as a reclusive mechanomancer outside town.
Father Karl Horne - The priest at St. Jude's, the local Catholic church.
Edith Kilmore - the old lady who runs the heritage house and has apparently met Marcus before, though the latter has no memory of it.
Suzy Quimby - the girl who accidentally painted Sara into a painting. hasn't gone insane quite yet.
Ramona Whitman - the former psych prof turned into some kind of 'thing' by the Other Place. Currently deceased.

Minor Cast
Leon Debran - owner of the Bleeding Crow, never seen yet.
The Bartender - surly 20 going on 40 something bartender at the Bleeding Crow.
Milk Delivery Man - a man who delivers milk, with live cow, to Delilah's house.
Paper boy - the pre-dawn paperboy who delivers papers.

Apotheosis Notes

So, we have a mail-order husband of a physics prof and a free-spirited college girl as the PCs (so far).

The town of Elysium, Kansas, is a small university city in the county of Rutherford. 3000 students, 1300 other residents and then assorted staff and such. It's bracketed by ghost towns, like munch of Kansas, and the locals claim the New Deal destroyed it, though there's almost no one left who can provide specifics to that beyond generic bitterness.

Essex University is the centre of the city, for all intents. What this means is the bars are little more lenient with students and the three police officers sometimes let things slide they shouldn't. Sergeant Jerry Letherwood runs the small police station along with constable's Oki Oki and Lance Christensen.

Aside from this, the city has two hotels - a Day's Inn and a Super 8. There's the usual bars, Denny's, Starbucks, McPlaces and so on. Stuff can be added and such as players want.

Unknown Armies campaign idea

Apotheosis

There are so few left, so terribly few. Every few years the old gods put on new faces, ripping them from the flesh of the living, standing over the bones of the dead. These are only metaphors: but the gods change. All things change, or perish. One pursues novelty or clings to habits. Both ends may be destructive. All things change, and move towards their end.

Every year new gods are born, despite all the old gods do and be and every effort of will and desire. Things happen, despite our most feverent prayers, our most profound hopes. The world gives birth to new gods in this age of change and wildness where all the terrible power of old traditions breaks down and in the centre of the world the world discovers that the centre does not hold.


You've heard whispers, or rumours of them. Read graffito visible only under a new moon. Saw the homeless bum who told people The End was coming get bundled off by men in white suits when he tried to tell people the truth, screamed: "You did it!" to everyone he met, weeping whiskey tears all the while.

Something is changing, has changed, is coming. There is something in the air, the hint of a storm, the knowledge that the calm is over. The world is changing. You feel it in your pineal gland, see it in strange news items, read about it in the gossip section of the paper. Somewhere, out there, men who are far more than men are gathering, and men who are terribly less gather as well. Their are armies moving through shadows, down paths known only to small children and cats, and though they are unknown, they are still armies, and there is still a war.

Because the rumours say that we made the gods, and that the universe will remake itself once we've made so many. That they will make a new one. A better one. Or they did yesterday, and there are those who want the old one back -- it doesn't matter, not really. All that matters, all that is known, is that there are over 330 gods walking the world, and that unless we are terrible or clever or very lucky, soon there will be more and there will no longer be a world.


So, this is what popped out of my head for an Unknown Armies campaign. The PCs can be In The Know (as much as anyone is), or only some, or be thrown off the deep end to tread water and drown beautifully. Entirely up to the players, as is the PC.

Standard UA PC (220 points). Each PC has a Dark Secret, something horrible they've done and never want anyone to learn. And a Trigger, which is something Weird you saw (or the first weird thing you saw) that told you the world was even stranger than advertised on cheap talk shows during ratings week.

The PCs should be connect somehow. This can be an ally, an organization, them being neighbours in the same apartment complex -- it's up to you all, but your PCs should know each other before the game, at some level.

Where it's going: This is unknown armies. Surreal urban fantasy, sprinkled with horror. It's about power and consequences, and what you'd do to change the world. It's about having the guts to see the world as it is, not as we desire it to be -- and maybe, just maybe, finding a way to make the desire come true, or learn why it can never be. It's about being as hard as you have to be, as kind as you can afford to be, and doing what has to be done.

Because the heart of the world has a secret, and everyone knows it even if no one can really believe it. And it means everything, and nothing. You find it scrawled in bathrooms, written on your bed sheets when you wake up, replacing texts in a newspaper. Truth so old no one believes it. Magic so old no one understands it.

You Did It.

.... Now what are you going to do about it?

Proposed Unknown Armies Game

Some caveats:

1) This will begin when Defenders ends* (should be 1-3 sessions, really)
2) Regular or 'when people are about' time needs to be determined. If the latter, what night(s) work best and so on.
3) UA is urban horror; except the weird, the surreal, the screwed up. The world is a reflection of the Pcs, the PCs are a reflection of the world.
* Defenders could continue; but defeating Wiley is basically the end of the plot. In what form it continues - if it does - will be up to players/gm after that.


First off, this game is going to need players. Contact Alcar if you are willing to play. Secondly, the players need to get together and decide what kind of game they want to play in and kinds of characters they want to make.

Some GM ideas:
- A game where the PCs ARE clued in. They know about magick, weirdness, the general occult underground. They may not be a cabal, but they at least have their toes in the water of weirdness and probably a good campfire on the beach.
- The PCs know each other before the game begins.
- PCs that reflect the sheer weird/odd/strange aspect of UA. Go big here. Go wild. Go crazy and nuts and have wild fun with it. Make characters you'd love to play, as long as they can interact and work with others.

The latter is pretty much essential. PCs may be screwed up, but they're somewhat functional. Exactly what this entails is up to everyone but at heart it means you interact with other pcs willingly. This is group role playing, after all. Consider it a challenge :P

Aside from that, nothing major springs to mind. I think most of the players are familiar with basic UA cosmology (if not, let me know). We can tweak it here and there, but generally we'll bend it more than break it. (This can be considered a challenge for the gm :p)

And that's it. Thoughts? Ideas? Throw them here, in channel, or wherever.