Dune 2d20 Whalefall - Playtest 2

DrFaustusAU

 

Bene Gesserit Sister Wilhelmina fell. Her shuttle down to Giedi Prime exploded in flight and her sealed capsule fell out of the sky, stuttering descent barely slowed by the sporadic activations of the emergency suspensors. The suspensors failed entirely and the capsule fell the rest of the way. She was ready for the impact but an unsecured object left by the flight crew struck her in the throat, crushing her hyoid bone at the most inappropriate time. She was at no risk of suffocating thanks to her excellent physical control, but the injury prevented her from using the Voice.

The first thing she noticed was the stink, like a thousand animals being melted in a giant vat. She calculated that the shuttle must have been flying over the megafarms outside Harko. She levered the door open and was confronted with the reeking whalefields of House Texoco, confirming her suspicions. Cetaceans dangled from enormous derricks, penetrated with tubes that siphoned precious bodily fluids through pipelines to an enormous tryworks in the distance. The rendering plant sent up enormous clouds of foul smelling smoke, mingling with the sooty sky that reflected sunlight from all angles like a greasy mirror.

Chaak Tlaxxon, son of the Jaeger Katl Tlaxxon, and the Jaeger's Spymaster Vagar watched the falling star from a sniper tower overlooking the whalefields. Vagar called it in to Brine, Captain of the Guard. Brine promised the militia would ventilate the escape pod with bullets, killing anyone inside so that they wouldn't be tortured to death by their overlords in House Texoco. Chaak immediately dragged Vagar into his hotrodded grain hauler and swooped down to the crash site, heading off the massacre.

 

Unknown Armies Adept Tactics Part 4: My Schools

Here are some caster schools by me for my Unknown Armies 3e Adept tactics series. This is how casters from the school respond if attacked when they aren't expecting it, casting spells to either quickly eliminate the threat or open an escape route. If they expect a fight they bring backup, weapons, magick items and preprepared buffs, in which case you should dig into the full spell list rather than using this quick reference.

 

FATAL and Friends Reviews Condensed

 

I sometimes get requests to repost my reviews from the FATAL and Friends thread. People have trouble sifting through the forum posts, or the site goes pay to read, or they just want everything in one place. Copying all the reviews would take work, and I don't like some of my writing from five or six years ago. My early work was too people-pleasing. Even when I argued with other posters it was because I wanted them to like the game I was talking about, or at least the parts of it I liked. The point of an RPG review is not to sell the book, that's the publisher's job. I am flattered that people like to read my longform writing with lots of pictures and examples but I also think I could make the whole thing shorter and skip to the conclusion. So here's that.

 

Thank you to everyone in the thread and elsewhere who read and replied to my work over the last eight years, I wouldn't have gotten this far without you.

 

Brigador Killers Demo On Steam

I haven't written a ton of RPG stuff in the last month or two because I'm doing some guest writing on a video game called Brigador Killers. The devs have been hard at work on the game for almost a decade and just released a demo on Steam. You can play it here. Have fun!

Unknown Armies Adept Tactics Part 3: My Favorite Statosphere Schools

Welcome back to Adept Tactics for Unknown Armies 3e. This quick reference guide lets you pick spells for your NPC casters when the players ambush them unexpectedly and you don't have time to go through the whole list. In part 3 we'll cover my favorite Statosphere schools, and a couple fanmade schools that didn't make it onto the site before Atlas allowed the program to die by neglect.

 

Unknown Armies Adept Tactics Part 2: Core Set Katharomancy to Viaturgy

 

Welcome back to Adept Tactics for Unknown Armies 3. Part 1 can be found here. To make it a little more useful at a glance, I'm shading the "best" general purpose combat spell for an Adept to throw out in blue. If you found this document because you need an answer right now, look for the blue shaded spell.

 

Unknown Armies Adept Tactics Part 1: Core Set: Agrimancy to GNOMON

 

 

Unknown Armies 3 has one of my favorite RPG battle systems ever. I'm not talking about the page of ways to avoid a fight, I'm talking about what happens after that when you inevitably ignore it. The weapon and spell rules collide with the coercion and sanity systems and the real fight takes place in the psychic terrain of the mind as much as the physical battlefield. Weapons and spells can kill you instantly but most of the time the fight is decided when someone breaks and runs away, or comes up with a novel way to disable the enemy with a spell that you'd never think to use in combat.

 

Adepts are the most mechanically dense caster type in UA3. They each get several pages of spells and often their own unique subsystems governing how they deploy them. Adepts are lifestyle magick users and would know their own spell lists by heart, but I don't. Sometimes it's worth pausing the game to pore over the spell list in search of the optimal play for a character who would, realistically, know exactly what to do. Sometimes it's better to just make something up and call it random magick. Especially if the NPC is powerful enough that they have charges to burn, like the Plutomancer and Agrimancer from The Colonel's Table. They got multiple sigs a day from their mundane business activities, they could just throw out random magick that fits their schools thematically and pay the premium for going outside the formula spells.

 

But I would like to color inside the lines of the game system whenever possible, because having restraints forces magick users to be more creative and stops them completely taking over the game. Unknown Armies is not a Pathfinder style game of tactical combat but I really appreciate how those designers gave NPC spellcasters with lengthy spell lists their own "tactics" section explaining what they did in a fight. Default behavior and a couple if/thens to account for the most likely outcomes of a battle. So I wrote this for Unknown Armies 3e.

 

These are spells for a street fight, where the caster wants to either disable their attackers or escape the situation. They don't encompass all the things Adepts can do outside of combat to ruin someone's life, which are typically more dangerous because the target doesn't know they're happening and can't fight back. When the NPCs do that, you've got the time to look in the spell list and pick things that fit their master plan and hit the players where they're vulnerable. This list is for what the NPCs do right the fuck now, in the middle of a fight. 

 

Adepts have the ability to store spells in magick artifacts for later use. This is something you should decide beforehand based on the character's power level (checker, charger, big named faction NPC, global or cosmic NPC, etc), whether they use their charges often or save them up, and whether their caster school allows them to cheaply charge on a daily basis. The artifact creation process can create something from nothing, giving you more uses of a spell than the charges you put into it. Some schools become a lot more dangerous if they can carry an item around that lets them fire off a powerful spell over and over even after tabooing.

 

For now we'll cover the first nine spell schools in the UA3 core set, books 1 through 5, going alphabetically.

 

Camp Followers: Social Realist Dungeonsploitation

Weenix

This is a dungeon crawling game where you play as Camp Followers, civilians who accompany a party of NPC Adventurers on a dungeon expedition. You can play it with the system and dungeons you already have. I'm using OSE Advanced Fantasy for mine and I'll try to offer examples any time I say to grab something off the internet. The social dynamic between the Followers and the Adventurers fits any setting from the bronze age to the early modern period, or their fantasy equivalents.

 

His Majesty The Worm: Day of the Newts Playtest

Traveling mountebank Bartoc the Orc and his wife Mary the Alchemist woke at their camp site to find Mary's mother, Salamandra "Sherry the Mage" Hakkapeliitta, missing. In her place were a set of webbed footprints leading into a fissure in the nearby rock face that definitely wasn't there last night. They thought about retrieving Mary's father Lorikeet "Larry the Mage Hakkapeliitta and her sister Tansy Hakkapeliitta from the nearby town where they were staying. They decided to err on the side of speed and went into the cave after mom.

 

Unknown Armies: Special Order Effects Generator

The premise of Mak Attax, Break Today and all the successor conspiracies in UA3 is that you put magickal charges in foodstuffs using a Ritual of Correspondence, people eat the food and the charges fire off to generate a random supernatural effect. The conspiracies have different systems to generate the charges, different modes of operation for handing them out and different reasons why they do it in the first place but they use similar underlying mechanics.

 

According to the principle of Blind Targeting, someone who opposes the conspiracy's goals/principles who eats a Special Order suffers an Unhappy Meal effect. They get hurt or debuffed or prevented from carrying out an evil deed. A friendly who eats a Special Order gets a beneficial effect. It may not be exactly what they want, or even what they need, but it helps them somehow. A normal person could hypothetically get anything. The hope is that they get something neutral or beneficial that makes them more accepting of magick broadly (or of the specific conspiracy's beliefs). All conspiracies that distribute Special Orders have some variant of the same rule that you monitor and help people who consume your Special Orders, like tripsitting someone when they take acid. Because Special Orders are distributed along Ley Lines (the highway system where the fast food restaurants are sited), their power is enhanced far beyond what should normally be possible by spending a single minor charge.

 

Coming up with random supernatural effects on the fly that fit all these parameters is a lot of work for something that happens multiple times per session. The original Break Today book had a D100 lookup table of examples, which ranged from permanent superpowers to instant death. While it was a great example of why the antimagick conspiracies wanted to exterminate Mak Attax (they blinded me and turned my son into a dog!) it was in serious need of an update. Here's how I handled it in my recently wrapped Colonel's Table game, expanded to include the other Special Orders factions from UA3 Book 2 and the upcoming Statosphere series.

 

The Colonel's Table: Masterpost

 

 

Unknown Armies: The Colonel's Table, a burgerpunk game about the magickal revolution. Blood magic. Scary monsters. Brainwashed cultists. Mad bombers. The snap of the deep fryer as a bubble of hot fat leaps out to kiss your face just below the eye. You aren't insane. You aren't stuck in a dead end job that will eventually kill you. You're workin' for the Colonel. 

 

The Colonel's Table: Finale

 

On the eleventh day the Coterie launched its offensive against the Court. Ed Vespier was reeling from the events at the Bible Museum. Sebastian Gentry was dead, his agricultural agents uninterested in pursuing the feud further. The Cadre knew where the Court's next shipment of Special Orders would arrive. The Burger Queen's allies were in disarray and violating the treaty was worth it because they believed they could win.  

 

The FBI Agent's files showed that the truck carrying the charged burgers necessary for the Court to manufacture Special Orders would travel through town along the state highway to the East Wenatchee restaurant. The local cops were subverted by the Cadre through Arch and Rob, they'd allow it as long as the violence didn't escalate to a level they couldn't ignore. Cameron Wilson the labor organizer had already laid the foundations two nights prior for an anti ICE demonstration which would block the road at that time. Jazzy Boulevard the mad bomber made an IED and stuffed it in a backpack for the Cadre to use. 

 

Following the death of Deacon Moses the night before, Hank, Fonz and Pagan were assigned the mission. The refrigerated truck carrying the Court's Special Orders would stop in traffic and they would either secure the load of charged meat inside or deny it to the enemy. The Cadre hired Sauza the Bridge Troll to provide backup. They gave him two Special Orders out of their three for the night and he agreed to bring a brute squad of his most trusted hobos and fentanyl addicts. The rest of the Coterie would go after the Court operation in East Wenatchee. Keep Alice, Neal and the Lost Boys busy. 

 

The Colonel's Table: Session Ten

 

Pagan the troubled foster kid was excited. One of his friends at school was a member of a secret magickal paramilitary organization and invited him to join. He spent the last few days working at a shitty fast food place on the state highway but tonight was the night he would be initiated into the mysteries.

 

He arrived at the Wenatchee KFC at around 9 PM to find it closed. The lights were off, the doors and windows barricaded from the inside with furniture. Fonz Trepanier, Pagan's learning disabled friend from school, shouted down to him from the roof. A hand reached up and yanked the kid down out of the line of fire. A fat guy in a uniform ballcap peered much more cautiously over the parapet. When he saw Pagan he quickly lowered a stepladder down to ground level. Pagan climbed while the fat guy covered him. 

 

On the roof:

• Mick Redhook, portly ex-military type with a lisp and an AR/Red Dot combo 
• Commissar Nadia Gage, clad in her signature red scarf and toting an SKS
• Fonz Trepanier, excited to be there and rocking a Mini 14 

They told Pagan to keep his head down. The Church's goons had showed up armed (like Nadia told them to if they were ever going to show their faces again) and were somewhere out there in the dark. But they could handle it. Right now they needed Pagan to find Moses, who would have orders for him. Fonz was excited to tell his friend all about his adventures but the adults sent him on his way. Nobody shot at him out of the dark on the way down the ladder.