Zomnocon 2 Feedback

Zomner ran an Unknown Armies jam last week. It was supposed to just go for a weekend but he got tied up before closing submissions, so we got a whole week to send entries. The word count was 2,333 and stat blocks didn't count against the total. Submitters got to choose any of the following prompts 

• Film Noir (1940s genre of film)
• Inspired by a song
• Nepotism
• Old friends
• Positive change over negative
• Something important has been stolen
• Green thumb

There were fourteen submissions to the jam.

 

Unknown Armies Shotgun Scenario: Danse Macabre by mellonbread

This is my second Unknown Armies adventure about the bubonic plague, but the first one was already finished and thus ineligible for submission to the jam. It's an obvious riff on Canterbury Tales, which I didn't particularly like but stuck with me twelve years later.
 

SIGNIFICANT RITUAL: DOUBLE AND NOTHING by Kate C

Cool. I like rituals that don't require a lot of preparation or hokey set dressing, but have serious negative consequences for the user. Charging a toll is more fun and interesting than gating access. This ritual is useful for characters who need to quickly farm identities (real life identities, not the Unknown Armies game mechanic), giving them access to a new victim's paperwork every time they performed the swap.
 

SIGNIFICANT ARTIFACT: OLD FRIENDS by magnificentophat

I like this one. Only thing that's missing is a single sentence describing the make of the cups. Rocks glass, snifter, highball... The only thing that makes the glasses stand out visually is how they change appearance when filled.

 

 

MINOR RITUALS: CHAIN MAIL by Kate C and magnificentophat

I don't see this being particularly useful to clandestinely siphon charges off other people, but it could be useful for consensual transfer of sigs (or even majors) between willing participants. There's a lot of value to be gained by transferring charges from someone with a cheap caster school to an expensive one. The Court of the Burger Queen could use it to settle debts without involving charged burgers by simply ordering mages who owed charges to participate.
 

Unknown Armies: The International Hotel by Valiant

I read this one a couple times and I still don't understand what I'm looking at here. The building has a stat block, is this a Paragon Place? The document ends by saying there's nothing supernatural going on, but the Hotel has two supernatural identities. An example "storypath" from start to finish would help me understand how this is all supposed to work in practice.
 

The Lafayette Fair by Joyful

This is a great setup with cool characters but I don't understand how it all fits together. The kid is missing because she got lured away by the raccoon, the police officer pregen created the raccoon for... some reason. He hates his father but practices a school of magick that's functionally identical to his father's worst misdeeds, and he believes his father is somehow still around the fair. I don't see any sign anywhere else in the scenario that the dad is still around, so I'm not sure if it's up to the GM to decide how he manifests or if the police officer pregen is just paranoid in a different way to the paranoid mom. An executive summary would go a long way to clear this one up.

A felon’s memoirs (artifact) by Cydd

This is cool. Some example "movies" based on the crimes of the viewers would add a lot of flavor. I dig how reviewers dismiss the movie as typical studio system dreck because it validates my preconceptions about movies from the 50s.

I BREAK MIRRORS WITH MY FACE IN THE UNITED STATES by Tuesday 8:00

This one is pretty funny but I'm not sure what the gameplay implications are. He feels like Moonglow and the other Book 5 NPCs who do their own thing and don't necessarily hook into things the players care about. More detail on his motivations would go a long way to unlocking his potential. If nothing else he could be a fun background character, breaking mirrors with his head wherever he goes.

Speaking to the Leaves (Minor Ritual) by Karin M

I like this one. An example modern day Garden Hermit (or several examples without necessarily needing to make each one a full NPC with identities and passions and meters) would really bring it to life. I agree that it's good to color just a bit outside the lines of what magick is capable of according to the core rules. It makes the NPCs feel like actual wizards rather than engineers reading out of an established manual, and it encourages the players to make the spell schools their own rather than sticking completely to the script.

 

Rephaim by Chris Cooper

A solid Tim Powers style entry, reinterpreting a legendary/Biblical monster as a scary ghost. Maybe my favorite submission to the jam.

Basic Concept by Void Ho!

This is a good start, but a bit too thin to be usable at the table. Writing up the entire mystery would be an insane amount of work and far outside the scope of a weekend jam, but focusing on one NPC or cabal from the list would be a great way to take the concepts presented here and turn them into something that could actually be inserted into a game.

Phoebe Bailey by Cliomancer

A complete, well-realized entry with a spread of use-cases. Her dismissive attitude to avoid being locked into a conversation and breaking taboo reminds me of the severely autistic genetic super genius from Deep Space Nine, who gets out of awkward situations by dressing like a Starfleet admiral and saying "that's a stupid question" in response to anything anyone says to him.

¥0 Location: Gakkuda by mellonbread

The original concept for this was a chain smoking chef in the revolving restaurant on top of the Yanggakdo Hotel in Pyongyang, using his smoking powers to spy on guests and run his own illegal operations. That's a location that Unknown Armies characters are unlikely to ever visit. Osaka is on the big Shinkansen line and more likely to be visited by characters from ¥0, the coming-eventually splatbook about food vendors on the bullet train. I used Tormsen's guide to North Korean names that he originally wrote for Office 44, which lays out the differences between naming conventions from the South and provides some examples.

Unknown Armies Shotgun Scenario: My Heart is a Haunted House by mellonbread

This idea has been in my UA commonplace book for a while. Copula Saltonstall is an example mold mage that I created a few months ago when I wrote up the casting school. The rest of the scenario is original to the jam. The Goddess cult gets a short writeup in UA 2e, no NPCs and only a vague description of the abilities they get from an unspecified collection of magick items. The surviving Druidess' powers are based on that list.

Of the entries that listed which prompts they used, all prompts were used twice except the stolen items prompt which was used three times, and the positive change prompt which wasn't used at all. It's impossible to tell for sure how much use each prompt got because not all submitters listed their chosen prompts.

Thank you to everyone who submitted, and I hope to see more events like this in the future.