The Test Firing 4/4: The Big Gun Down

it flew over the plain in a cloud of thinning dust and its beak was slick with carrion shellac and its wings ragged but still functional and its thoughtstream had already migrated on from the two prey animals it had swooped and pecked at and although it would recognize them again if it encountered them it no longer thought about them at all and it should have been unable to distinguish between people because none had existed in the ancestral environment but years of patient study compressed into a thin sheet of metal had taught it to recognize the sound and appearance of the man who carried it close to his heart imprisoned crucified on the wall of the barn where it had hung for centuries since the men posing with guns had holed its wings and smashed its bones and punctured its lungs and sent it falling out of the air and now in the air once again it detected the voice and the heat and the heartbeat of the man far below it and circled to plan its descent with the sun behind it so if he spotted it he would be unable to see

The Test Firing 3/4: Entombed at La Momia

Corporal Danny Obierika and Private Gerald Maw crouched behind the great gun, which shielded them from the worst of the skinning sand. Danny donned a welder’s mask, Maw had a pair of safety goggles to protect his eyes, and both wore condoms over the barrels of their loaded muskets. The cannon could survive a little sandblasting, though it might erode the engraved crowns and maple leaves and Southern Crosses and other symbols of empire decorating the metal. They were more afraid of deliberate sabotage. A “freak” dust storm driving off the crowd was just too inconvenient to ascribe to mere chance.

They couldn’t hear each other speak, and even with bandanas over their mouths it would have only have filled their mouths with enough dust to turn their teeth to powder. Private Maw had to elbow Danny to get his attention as he pointed his weapon to the sky. Though the cloud looked black as it came toward them it appeared red from the inside.

The Test Firing 2/4: Inch of Dust

Yazdegerd and Roxana stumbled toward the great shining house at the end of the plain. The horse had panicked and refused to go on and nothing he did could coax it further. Roxana and he were used to running on bare feet but they had fled with only the bare minimum they could gather. They carried horse blankets, a little water, a handful of nuts, a little vinegar, a clasp knife, a fistful of pilfered denarii and their six month old son, Julian.

(They told each other Yazdegerd was the father. Not one of the soldiers who regularly inflicted themselves on Roxana - and on Yazdegerd when they were drunk)

They were no longer on the border, that much was clear. The grasses and flowers were unlike any they’d seen. So too the black towers strung with rope. Strange fortifications dividing the lands into parcels with abatis of metal. It wasn’t the first time this had happened. When the soldiers got lost and blamed the scouts and the unfortunate local guides recruited at swordpoint and the “filthy fucking fire worshipers” who twisted the terrain and summoned visions of things that couldn’t exist. Its apparition was perfectly timed. The soldiers caught them fucking and decided to cut off Yazdegerd’s balls. Roxana endured their abuse, acted suitably chastised, then freed the stablehand before the smithy could heat the gelding knife.

The Test Firing 1/4: Do you have 500 pound balls?

Outlaw Journalist Namond Lick sweltered in his PRESS vest and bucket hat and scribbled in his notepad as the Redcoat told him the score. He was wired for sound and everything was recorded anyway, but people liked the notepad. They wanted to be remembered.

The guy who wanted to be remembered was Colonel Ravinder Bhoja of the 333rd Regiment of Foote. His living history troop was out in the Wyoming backcountry for a little demonstration of a project they’d been working on. Men (and, Namond noted, one woman) in red jackets fussed over bags and boxes, showed off their kit and practiced their musketry in front of a crowd of onlookers (mostly family and friends), firing live buck and ball loads from their land pattern muskets at improvised targets of stacked stone. Unusually for a reenactment group, especially from this period, there wasn’t a single White face among them, and it was that topic that the Colonel had chosen to expound upon.

Against Torches

You ever tell someone you don’t like [food], and they tell you “no you just haven’t had GOOD [food]”? So you go to the restaurant they tell you and order the thing they tell you and, surprise surprise, you still don’t like it? 

That’s me with tracking torches. For years I’ve considered it a waste of time. And whenever I tell anyone this they say “torches are good, you just have to make tracking light matter!”

Unknown Armies Playtest - Holiday in Caledonia

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Unknown Armies Shotgun Scenario: The Greggs and the Graveyard

The Fourwentways Bronze Age Cemetery, off the A11 interchange outside Cambridge. Past the roundabout where the trucks park, behind the Travelodge. A small interpretive sign explains the significance: four thousand years ago, primitive Britons inhumed their dead beneath a complex of burial mounds that once stood on this spot. Today, the site is naught but a fenced off patch of grass and a few sickly trees, littered with rubbish from the nearby combination Burger Greggs.

It’s the middle of autumn and the middle of the night. The moon’s the color of bone but you wouldn’t know it through the clouds. Everything is wet.

Unknown Armies Playtest - The Greggs and the Graveyard

Four Catholics in a borrowed Nissan Altima pulled into the parking lot of a combination Greggs/Burger King off the A11 in Cambridge, England.

• Sister Agia, Missionary of Charity and Parapsychologist Nun
• Dario "Johnny Boy" Ambrosio, Geriatric Wise Guy
• Father Romero, Jesuit Priest and Padre With a Shotgun
• Deacon Sur, Drunken Priest and Exorcist

They were from the Order and they were tracking illegal digging at Bronze Age sites across the UK. They knew the burial ground behind the Burger Greggs off the A11 roundabout at Fourwentways would be next. The back windows of a fast food restaurant, a Shell station and a Travelodge all looked out over the shallow domes of the fenced historic site. It was Autumn and almost midnight and everything was wet.

Monster Mash Test Drive - The Tunnel Under the Tundra

 

A Dwarven exploratory mining expedition disappears beneath the permafrost layer of the ancient tundra.

Unknown Armies Shotgun Scenario: Black Coffee

 
1980. Skyrocketing coffee prices induce East Germany to send engineers and help the Vietnamese establish first rate coffee plantations. In exchange the GDR will receive half of Vietnam’s coffee harvest for the next twenty years.

Coffee is to Teutons like tea is to the English. Its absence is apocalyptic. It’ll take years for the Vietnamese coffee operation to bear fruit. The way things are going, there won’t be an East Germany by then. 

Unknown Armies Playtest - Black Coffee

After a grueling multi-day trip, four East German farmers peered out the windows of a Soviet made Mi-4 transport helicopter as it descended toward an old coffee plantation in the wilderness of Vietnam's central highlands.

• Arnold Lindwurm, 19, unemployed since finishing conscription. Malcontent with a knack for evading surveillance. Raised chickens illegally in his apartment.
• Kasper Pfennig, Volkssturm child soldier, raised in a Free German Youth camp after the war. 50 years old, loved working outdoors and with kids.
• Melissa Preisner, apolitical hog farmer from a collective farm outside Berlin. 25 years old, liked animals and heavy physical labor.
• Sandro Griebel, Russian war bastard fathered during the rape of Berlin. 35 years old, worked in a slaughterhouse, raised sheep on his one acre “personal housekeeping” plot.

The year was 1980.  Skyrocketing coffee prices induced the German Democratic Republic to send engineers and help the Vietnamese establish first rate coffee plantations. In exchange the GDR would receive half of Vietnam’s coffee harvest for the next twenty years. Coffee was to Teutons like tea to the English. Its absence was apocalyptic. It would take years for the Vietnamese coffee operation to bear fruit. The way things were going, there wouldn't be an East Germany by then.

That's why the four mages had been rounded up by Kramer, a Stasi transvestite who somehow knew they were all Agrimancers. Their mission: use their magic to accelerate coffee production at the plantation by any means necessary.

Unknown Armies Pashacon Jam Results

Another Unknown Armies jam wrapped a couple weeks ago. Parameters will be familiar to anyone who's been following this series. Let's see how we did.

 

His Majesty The Worm - Pile of Blades Masterpost

Pile of Blades is a city and undercity I wrote for His Majesty The Worm. I played through it in seven sessions, about one for each realm of the Undercity.