Gareth Ryder-Hanrahan's Unknown Armies Con Scenarios

 

 

While looking for entries to use in Tormsen's Unnatural Phenomena Jam, I found links to some of Gareth Ryder-Hanrahan's old Unknown Armies con scenarios from the early 2000s on the defunct game.eire site. The Wayback machine had captures of all the relevant .zip files. 

 

John Tynes ain't dead but he's under a noncompete at Wizards, which is basically the same thing. Meanwhile Hanrahan is the best of the Pelgrane devs, his blogposts are better than most of the other guys' published products. But was he always a scenario writing powerhouse, even twenty years ago? I uploaded his UA con adventures here for people to read. I've never heard anyone talk about any of them so hopefully you enjoy reading along.

 

This is not a full review since I haven't run/played any of the modules. I'll likely never run them regardless of quality. If I ever get enough players together for Unknown Armies again I've got a bunch of my own stuff at the top of the pile to be run.

 

CARCOSA, NEW JERSEY

A quintessential Tim Powers type scenario, taking after Expiration Date. An Atlantic City hotel owner who traps and bottles ghosts in his evil casino is targeted by two groups of occult criminals planning separate heists. 

 

The plot only involves a handful of the seven(!) pregenerated player characters, with the others serving as muscle or observers to the action. The adventure falls back on the classic Unknown Armies chestnut "improvise an evocative and thematically fitting thing" several times, instead of actually giving the GM something to work with. At several points the players are harrassed by ghosts or see sections of the casino erupt into ghost chaos, but there aren't any examples given to populate the list. This adventure was released around the same time as Countdown, where Road to Hali and the Night Floors both provided a bunch of cool encounters to keep the ball rolling any time something scary needed to happen.

On the other hand, Carcosa NJ is the most "robust" scenario in the pack, with a variety of possible outcomes depending on what the players do or don't do. And making some of the characters plot irrelevant was a deliberate decision on the author's part as a hedge against no-shows.

FALL OF THE SPARROW

The millenarian predictions of a year 2000 cult don't come to pass, leaving the disappointed true-believers to face a demonic threat on January 1st. After the massacre, a separate crop of pregens arrive to investigate, solve the mystery, and maybe even defeat the bad guy.

The basic structure of the scenario, where a crop of disposable pregens get a chance to investigate before being slaughtered and investigated by the real player characters, was used to great effect twenty years later in ICONOCLASTS for Delta Green. I'm sure other scenarios have done the same - Unknown Armies used a variant in Bring Me The Head of Comte Saint Germain. I don't care for the execution here because the pregens have to suffer through a series of vignettes before play proper begins - a lengthy rant on the radio from Unknown Armies metaplot NPC Dirk Allen, a separate police interrogation of a supernatural hobo... The reason why the playable prologue format works so well is it delivers information through gameplay. So why lard everything down with a lore filibuster anyway?

FAVOURED HORSE

I couldn't open the .zip file, and neither could the commenters on the Unnatural Phenomena page. Let me know if you can get it open or find another copy that works.

KIND HEARTS & CORONETS

The Godwalker of the Harlequin dies during Mardi Gras, but not before designating a handful of mundane healthcare workers as his successors. These freshly minted avatars are stalked by an evil mage channeling the same archetype, intent on ascending and replacing it with something nastier.

 

I like the overall arc but my beef is the same as with Carcosa NJ. Large segments of the scenario are freeform improvisation where the GM is supposed to create "tension" while coloring inside the lines of supernatural phenomena associated with the avatar path. The individual vignettes are cool but leave 4/5 of the table waiting patiently for other people to resolve their solo adventures. This is fine in a campaign game where "self play" is the result of each player's decisions influencing the next person in line. For a con game with pregens, I'm not so sure.

For all my disquiet, This adventure deserves credit for assuming that the players will dive right into the conflict and try to become Godwalkers/Ascended Avatars themselves rather than backing a metaplot character or DMPC as the best candidate. I'm looking at you, To Go and Bring Me The Head. The focus is always on the players and what they do.

Greetings card celebrating Indian nuclear test, 1998

LOS ALMOST

Horny teenagers in modern day Los Alamos are pursued by an atomic sorcerer. This adventure isn't actually by Gareth, it's by Eamon Honan and Meg Hilko. He posted it to Unnatural Phenomena though, so it's going in the list.

The first half of this adventure is a series of cutscenes where the players watch the antics of an NPC. It's very evocative but has essentially no gameplay other than roleplaying their reactions to stuff that the GM tells them is happening. The last act of the scenario opens up and gives them a chance to adventure and investigate. This is a bad idea in a oneshot because the stuff at the end of the scenario is most likely to be compressed out of existence for time. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I couldn't find game statistics for the villain's caster school "Shivamancy", which sounded cool. It feels like the early run of Delta Green shotgun scenarios, where playability took a backseat and the important thing was being fun to read.

The easiest fix, especially since it's a con scenario, would be to make the intro more interactive. There are two scenes at the beginning where the players do nothing while the atomic mage runs riot. If there was something for the players to do then you could start the actual gameplay segment earlier, while still incorporating the key themes of adolescent sexuality and parental pressure into the core narrative. Cut some of the flabby middle and go straight to the kidnapping and conclusion with the atomic ritual.

RECOUNTING THE COST

A New Inquisition hit squad rushes to stop a cabal of old people from using relics of the 2000 presidential election to shift the United States into an alternate history.

Start with a slapdash series of encounters with NPCs who send you down the line to the next guy, chasing leads on behalf of your TNI masters without really knowing what's going on. Then a road trip through a bunch of cool alternate Americas, starting with the one where Al Gore won the election and getting weirder with each map transition. End with a showdown versus the cabal of oldsters trying to undo the Kennedy assassination and spin a new timeline off 1963.

 

I haven't talked much about specific pregens but I think these ones are uniquely bad. There's a robot woman whose brain is a wax cylinder that can't get too hot or she loses her memories. Sounds cool. Her character sheet says she has no obsession or personality, the most she can aspire to is to potentially sacrifice herself. More generally I think in the 1990s and 2000s people believed that backstory=personality, and everyone thought a page of lore was a substitute for interesting character motivations that actually came up in play.

 

For all my criticisms, this is the only module in the pack that feels right-sized for a convention play slot. And it doesn't save on length by leaving everything up to GM improvisation. The alt-history realms are given enough supporting detail that each one can be resolved single interesting encounter, which is all you really need.

WHAT DID WE LEARN?

All the scenarios have an executive summary that tells you "how to run [foo] in five minutes". This section broadly explains the plot and what's likely to happen if the players do various things, or nothing at all. This is essential and something many RPG scenarios released in the present day lack. Adventures are typically written like mystery novels, where the GM learns what happens at the end rather than from a solid executive summary at the beginning. 

I think Carcosa, New Jersey is the best designed scenario, and Los Almost is the most fun to read. The others have less evocative premises or look like they'd be a hassle to run. Recounting the Cost is the only one that seems paced appropriately, the rest would benefit from being shorter, especially for convention play. This may be a change in social norms around what the appropriate length is. I recall actual plays of Adam Scott Glancy's convention scenarios from the 2000s which went well over the four hour mark, when today three hours is considered the norm.

Hanranan clearly understands that Unknown Armies is a game you sell with scenarios, not setting or system. We're not playing a game about the invisible clergy and the metaphysics of the postmodern universe. We're not playing a game about broken people fixing the world, or about cosmic bum fights. We're not playing an elaborate D100 game with intricate subsystems for tracking the characters' internal mental states. We're playing a game about young love in the shadow of a mushroom cloud. About a kidnapping at an occult casino, and death cultists forced to find something to live for.