Dune 2d20 Whalefall - Playtest

Giger

Bene Gesserit Sister Wilhelmina was falling. 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.

The falling star had not gone unnoticed. Pyon laborers peered out from behind machinery, wiping tallow off their goggles to see her better. A grain hauler hovering lazily over the tableau turned suddenly and swooped toward her, its speed incongruous with its shitbox exterior. Wilhelmina quickly grabbed the contents of the pod's emergency box and made herself presentable.

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.