More Unknown Armies Pregens

Blake

More loose UA3 pregens, for use as oneshot player characters or emergency NPCs.

 

Unknown Armies 3e Canned Rules Tutorial

Here's the rules explainer I use when running one-off adventures for new players in Unknown Armies 3rd edition. It takes maybe half an hour at most. It's good to pause between paragraphs and give the players a chance to ask for clarification if they don't understand the basics. It's also okay to say "we'll cover that later" if they want a more in-depth exploration of individual subsystems.

Unknown Armies Artifact: Ha'nish's Harrow

DESCRIPTION: A bed of soft wool with leather straps to hold every joint of the body still, over which is suspended a curious apparatus. The apparatus menaces with glass needles, pointed downward at the bed. The whole thing is built in the Bauhaus style, with curved metal rails to suspend the apparatus and lots of cubes growing like geometric tumors from other cubes.

The apparatus includes a slot for punchcards from a Dehomag tabulating machine - a primitive electromechanical computer of the 1920s.

Unknown Armies Shotgun Scenario: The Full Boot

The Sleepers were bad people who got what they deserved in the ‘03 war, but even their detractors admit they performed an important pest control function. If they were still around, a place like The Full Boot wouldn’t last a week.

THE FULL BOOT

The Full Boot is a bar in an old Ancient Order of the Hibernians temple. The one the Know Nothings bombed in 1851, killing a dozen Irishman and leaving shrapnel scars on the interior walls still visible to this day. The name is a pun on the novelty glass boots they serve beer in, and their signature performance completely flaying the skin off a victim’s foot and lower leg.

The stairs lead down into the bar area, which is poorly lit during business hours. Low tables, cigarettes in defiance of the indoor smoking ban. Bar counter against one wall, where the soft light makes the things in the bottles swim. There’s something wrong with the barman. Other side of the room is the stage. They used it to give speeches, maybe a hundred years ago. Now the old wood is bloodstained, no matter how many tarps they lay down and how hard they scrub.

Unknown Armies Shotgun Scenario: Clown Death March

We were in Davidson (?), Illinois staying at a cheap no tell motel where staff got stuffed 8-10 to a room while Joe stayed in the tour bus with his boys. We had just gotten back from almost 24 hours at the local mall doing magic shows on the hour and showing off tigers in collapsible cages in-between. It was snowing like a motherfucker and I was perched on the balcony/second story walkway in a lawn chair smoking a cigarette when I saw the clowns.

The clowns were just ex-cons in their 50s-60s who wore clown makeup and were the hype men during the days at wherever we were stopped. They'd draw people out of the hustle and bustle of the mall towards the sad tiger shanty town we'd built in the middle of the mall (it was almost always malls or parking lots).

One big rule Joe Exotic had was NO ALCOHOL. I figure this stemmed from his brother dying via drunk driver. These old clowns had a helluva time with bottleache though, so whenever we'd get settled they would go straight for a liquor store or gas station. Since Joe was cozy in his tour bus, they wouldn't get caught. They didn't get out of costume or even wipe off the facepaint. They just threw on jackets and started walking. A line of 5 or 6 clowns in the snow, wandering towards the nearest bottle of KD. About an hour later I'm back on the balcony smoking and see these guys coming back. They're trudging through the snow, facepaint sloughing off, wearing clown clothes. Each one was carrying a bottle in a brown paper bag. They were walking single file. It is one of the most surreal things I've ever seen. Like some kind of horror movie death march. If I was artistically inclined I'd have already painted that strange tableau on black velvet and hung it in my living room.

Untrustable, February 2nd, 2020

Hex24: The Wedding of the Giantess Morwenna - The Lakeside Garden

George Baxter

This hex is surrounded by a stone fence with a wooden palisade on top, eight feet high in total, except on the lake side to the north. A gatehouse protected by nine Level 0 Soldiers armed with firearms protects the western approach, and a raised causeway on the southeast side leads up the hill to Morwenna’s steading. The river flows in through a grate under the fence on the south side, and out into the lake on the north. If the gate is attacked, the soldiers use a hand-cranked alarm to summon reinforcements.

The hex is a garden full of dinosaurs, brought from Isle of Sweat by traders who heard Morwenna loved the beasts. Enormous cycads the size of trees shelter the reptiles as they lumber from their wooden paddocks to graze on ferns and primitive grasses.

Unknown Armies - The Full Boot

Corrupt Chicago PD beat cop Archimedes "Arch" Brabrand had a problem. One of his informants, one Adrian Lebarge, was nowhere to be found. She was his source of information on the city's occult underworld and if something happened to her he'd have to cultivate a new source, which his ego and laziness would not allow.

He started his search downtown, to pester some detectives who owed him a favor. He swaggered into the cube farm where the homicide dicks flew their desks, and was immediately intercepted by Sergeant Gold. The old guy looked terrible, way worse than Arch remembered, and immediately told him to get the fuck out. There was something wrong with his voice and he was much surlier than normal. Like he was covering something up. Arch acted like he was leaving, then doubled back to rifle through Gold's desk. The last month of notes he had taken were borderline incomprehensible, but Arch picked out two things:

• A list of names and addresses, including Adrian's.
• Scribbled drawings of a boot, with foam overflowing the top like a novelty beer glass

He hit the streets before Gold caught him snooping around.

 

 

Adrian was a source of information on Chicago's supernatural underworld. That made her disappearance a problem for Blue Line, a circle of bent cops like Arch who investigated occult crimes. A pair of Cohles answered his summons to the hot dog shop to go over the facts of the case:

• Special Agent Manny Mordiggian, Disgraced Psychoanalyst and Hypnotist
• Robin Goodfellow "Rob" Dogma, Sheriff's Deputy and Super-Strongwoman

Maintenance and Preservation Masterpost

Maintenance and Preservation was a nine session Esoteric Enterprises open table I ran for a local RPG group. It was my first in-person game in years and was a lot of fun. The players were maintenance workers and had to go spelunking in the undercity to solve problems, dodging monsters and traps and getting chased around by different factions. Thank you to everyone who showed up to play, both the regular players and people who just tried out one session.

Maintenance and Preservation - Lessons Learned

Juan de Valdés Leal

 

Simplification is great. The lack of classes and class subsystems meant character creation only took a few minutes. This let new players quickly join tables of experienced players without the need to prepare before the session. This is a fantasy offered by other Basic clones like OSE and Lamentations, but in my experience chargen in those games takes substantially longer and requires more paperwork at the table, because you've got to pick a class and then copy a bunch of class features, saving throws and additional items (particularly rolled spells) to your sheet. Every player missed something on their first go (skills, starting items, the ability to "invert" ability scores which I admit is unintuitive) but since there weren't a lot of interdependencies on the sheet it was easy to fix.

 

Maintenance and Preservation - Session Nine (The End)

 

John Benson and Pepper woke up after a long fall. They were in a domed cave, on an island of fine grained white sand in a chalky blue underground lake. An Aelf fussed over them, face a photonegative of the unseelie fairies from the undercity they knew. He brushed a feather duster over John Benson's face, a stick with slimy tendrils cut off an underworld creature. The tendrils had no effect. Benson realized his hands were "bound" by a long glass spike, inserted through his wrists like a syringe. On a normal living human it would have made freeing his hands painful and debilitating. For an undead revenant it was easy.

 

Benson sat up and asked the fairy what was going on. The Aelf was disconcerted by his ability to move and talk. Pepper sat up, similarly unaffected by the paralytic poison from the cave crawler stick. The Aelf hadn't bound her hands yet, the glass spike lay on the sand ready for use. The Aelf shot Benson with a magic spell, which spattered harmlessly against his dessicated flesh. Pepper asked what was going on. The Aelf ran back into his hut, a structure of stone and leather. He turned out a bag onto the sand, containing their possessions.

Pepper realized that the weird underworld guy was trying to ensorcel/enslave them, and was trying to get rid of them now that he realized it wouldn't work. She thought about jumping him and stealing whatever he owned in retaliation, but Benson convinced her to focus on escaping the unknown cave before exacting revenge. He established a pidgin with the cave elf and learned that the way out was to the south, across a series of stepping stones sticking out of the beautiful blue water and through a passage in the rock. As for an explanation of his behavior, the Aelf told the humans that there was a vast wall of impenetrable glass, as high as the eye could see. There was a world on the other side, and he would kill every man in existence to get there.

 

The maintenance workers left. The Aelf was happy to see them go.

 

Maintenance and Preservation Music Post

This was an in-person game, played in a public place where I didn't have control over the sound system, so all these tracks are for my personal benefit.

 

Hex24 Bonus - The Winged Hobelars

Sergeant Baldwin was astride his flying mount Pneumatophore, leading a squadron of four troopers in a reconnaissance flight over the broken lands beyond the frontier, when he heard the voice in his head. Smoother than any voice could be if it spoke out loud.

Reprobates. Northeast. Two and a half leagues. Eleven hundred fathoms. Two flyers. Six Elves. Eleven Captives.

Reprobates being a pet name for an enemy formation, more dangerous than Poltroons, less so than Brigands. Leagues being the distance from his position. Fathoms the altitude. The two flyers would be the pteranodons the squadron was tracking. They were fierce reptiles but they couldn't take prey in the air. Couldn't fight an attack from above. The Elves on board would have Sleep memorized, a powerful disabler in ground combat but useless in a high altitude duel, where the wind and the shock of high-G turns would quickly wake a man who dozed off.

But how to rescue the captives? That was the real question, and probably why the slavers felt safe operating in the area when they must have known the Hobelars were near. They smugly assumed the presence of hostages would dissuade the squadron from engaging them in the air.

No. They wouldn't get away this time. He had a plan for that too. 

He thought hard about the Gnome, telepathically calling out the ranges of the minds glowing at the edge of her perception. Hidden in a surface camp to minimize the odds of being spotted, suspended in the harness that kept the weight of her head from bending her spine and crushing her internal organs.

He thought a message for her.

Going forth.

The wind blew through the face of his wooden sallet, freezing the drool that leaked around his tusks at the thought of battle. He ran his enormous tongue over his lips and squinted, looking for the promised foe.

There.

Baldwin raised his fist and the Squadron ascended.

Hex24: The Wedding of the Giantess Morwenna - The Stadium

The stadium is already constructed: a concentric ring of elevated seating around a cone shaped plinth. Above the benches are a series of poles with retractable screens of wool, to keep rain and direct sun off the audience. Besides the general seating there are several boxes for distinguished guests, and a big throne for Morwenna herself (stuffed with 5,000 SP worth of cave spider silk).